Interesting book about the future of work. The author's main premise is that we need to flatten the organizational structure of many companies in order to allow creative mores a of free reign to innovate. This is often done through remote working. He backs this up with a detailed account of his year at WordPress.com where he lead a project team completely made up of location independent workers.

Throughout the course of the book he comes up with some solid truisms:

1. Results trump tradition. This is born out by the fact that WordPress goes against just about every organizational tradition there is and build a successful company anyway. The reason is two-fold- people who work their trust each other and they have the same goals. This overcomes any lack of structure.

2.If you hire great people, one of the most important things a leader can do is stay out of the way. The author leads a team for a year and only checks in weekly with many of them, yet the accomplish a great deal.

3. Working remotely has drawbacks. He regularly writes about the lack of social cues when all of your communication is via text and Skype. While he thinks it can work for some companies (like WordPress) he admits that it has limitations. Some things need presence to work best.

Overall an interesting book that has some implications beyond the business world. If more and more firms start using this model, the academic world will need to change to better support it. ( )

The book is an easy reading with a pack of good experiences and observations about working in a chaotic and creative start up (wordpress). ( )

Sold me on Automattic as a company, pointed out many of the things I worry about with Continuous Deployment, but no solutions. Esp uncomfortable with how he characterized his time on happiness - he didn't like the metrics, but no ideas for solutions? blah ( )

Pleasant read but I have a problem following his logic ( )

This book could have been titled "Microserfs, twenty years later". Scott Berkun, a former Microsoftie himself, tells the story of his year working at Wordpress/Automattic, a successful software as a service startup run by the prodigy Matt Mullenweg. While Berkun's fawning over Mullenweg becomes grating rather quickly, the story about Berkun's entry into this virtual global company is told with aplomb. Much of the internal communication relies on a stream of team and company blogs as well as IRC and Skype. Given the video capabilities of Skype, though the company is composed mostly of males, I doubt whether the titular claim of "The Year Without Pants" is even partially true.

Mullenweg requested Berkun's service to create the first level of middle managers/team leaders at Automattic, up to then run by direct interaction with the founder. This meant that issues not focused on by Mullenweg were allowed to drift (e.g. Wordpress did not fix a broken LinkedIn connection for many months). Creating areas of responsibilities and fixed teams helped transform the startup company into a more stable business. Like so many accounts (and also novels), a lot of the book is spent on getting to know the people and forming the team. Unfortunately, the reader is not told a single management decision where a difficult trade-off had to be made. It's all about being captain in mild and beautiful weather. The necessity for the middle management layer (and its effectiveness) is thus not demonstrated. An additional 50 pages treating management issues is sadly missing from this book. Hasta la vista comes all too soon. ( )