- Used Book in Good Condition.
Q&A with Scott Berkun, author of The Year Without Pants
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Scott Berkun
You talk about having the right a of "friction" – and that
"few managers get it right." Yet one person’s friction is
another person’s fight. How can a manager engineer "y"
friction?
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The book details how I managed one team in search of the right
balance. Most management books are all theory – it's rare to read
a real manager, of a real team, actually trying to make it all
work. More so than any theory, reading well written accounts of
how real managers manage does more than piles of theory books in
helping managers see what's possible and how it's supposed to
work.
Think of the best teacher you ever had. Now think of the worst.
Both gave homework, both gave grades, yet the feeling you had
about those same activities things was different with each of
them. That's the way a good manager needs to think. Trust is
huge: you trust a good manager to have good reasons for pushing
you, just as you would for a great teacher. And much like
teachers, there is no quick tip that separates good managers from
bad: it takes time, experience and patience to learn.
You say in this book "the bottleneck is never code or creativity;
its clarity" Is this the biggest issue in the way for companies
trying to move forward?
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Any moderate sized corporation is a wasteland of
indecisiveness: it's all committees, review meetings and endless
email chains. We all know too many people have veto powers. If
you simply clarified who was the equivalent of a film director
for a product, or a division, who was empowered to break ties,
everyone would be freed to do better work: they'd spend more time
actually working and less time fighting over turf. The Year
Without Pants explores this in many ways, as the autonomy of the
culture created bottlenecks of a kind all on their own.
What was the hardest aspect of working at Wordpress.com for you
personally?
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I'm exposed in many ways in The Year Without Pants. That's one
of the meanings of the title. This book is honest and real:
writing about coworkers and your boss is dangerous. It was by far
the hardest book I've written. As an expert, my career is at
stake in how well readers think I did at practicing what I've
preached for a decade. And my coworkers who were there can
challenge anything I wrote or said. I don't know of any book
that's as revealing in so many ways about how work in the real
world is actually done.
Results vs. Process seems to be a theme…and yet process helps to
keep politics at bay …and power distributed …are they really
either/or?
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Only good processes keep politics at bay. Mediocre processes
amplify politics by creating more turf and more restrictions. Any
process should include a clause that defines when the process is
no longer necessary. This never happens and the result is rules
live on forever even after if their usefulness died years ago.
Process should be a slave to results, but it rarely is. It's
often the other way around.
This is a really interesting observation: "Every manager is kind
of a new experiment, and any experiment that goes wrong should
change." Do companies promoting someone to manager need to change
what and how they evaluate success?
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70% of all American employees are unengaged at work (Gallup
2013). All of those workers work for managers who are failing
them. Management, as a discipline, is a failure: we are not, on
average, good at it as a nation. We should be experimenting with
the very notion of management itself: why not elect managers? Or
promote them only on a trial basis? Or give the people who work
for them the power to reverse a promotion? As wild as these ideas
might sound I bet any of them would provide better results than
that 70% number. The bar for management is that low.
As Americans it's absurd how we never consider democratic
principles for management. Instead we have a system modeled on
what: monarchy? Oligarchy? I'm no radical, but I am open to other
influences in structuring how the powerful are chosen at
corporations.
It seems that storytelling, relationships, humor – i.e. the
humanity of WordPress.com – is so consciously intended – and with
great results. But didn’t they launch it with this in mind? How
would a 200 year old company, say, with layers of tradition even
begin to try to change its culture to get at a more meaningful
workplace?
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My story at Automattic is all about culture change: It was a
suicide mission for me to introduce traditional management ideas
into a company born of open source, independence and autonomy. I
was an outsider with a radically different set of beliefs and
experiences, which makes the core story of the book one about
culture change: or at least my insane attempts to make culture
change happen.
Any 200 year old company didn't start that way. It was grown and
you change a company the same way: you and nurture
them. One bright manager s a small seed in their own team
with some different rules. When they show better results than
other teams, other managers follow. Soon there is a high
performing minority and if the CEO has a clue they'll invest in
how to make that minority the majority. One way to read the The
Year Without Pants is "the year of attempting culture change."
How can an expert on management be useful in a place that doesn't
believe in management at all? That's my story and that's what the
book is about.