One of my rules for this newsletter is to always share and write timeless, evergreen content. This week I’m breaking that rule because history is being made in the way work happens, and we’re all living through it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was accelerating the trend toward remote and distributed work. Since then, companies such as Shopify, Twitter, Square, Coinbase and even Facebook came out with their intentions and roadmaps to become remote-first or remote-only companies. This is significant.
From a competitiveness perspective, companies who don’t take this proactive step may well be on the wrong side of history. Employers who have so far turned a blind eye to the rising trend of remote work — which really is the rising trend of human beings wanting to lead healthier, happier, purpose-driven lives — are now at a clear competitive disadvantage. They’ll have to catch up, both in mindset and practices.
Yet, the defining moment for remote work isn’t now, but rather in a few months once the dust settles. It is true no company collapsed because of the sudden WFH shift. But there hasn’t been enough time yet to understand the longer-term impact. Many businesses, particularly in Europe, have only been keeping the lights on with their employees working reduced hours in order to leverage government assistance programs. The real test for these companies — and for the behemoths that have now announced their plans to turn remote — is still to come. As Jason Fried of remote work veterans Basecamp warns us, “remote work is not office work remotely. It’s a different way to work. Mostly asynchronous, long stretches of uninterrupted time, fewer meetings, and fewer hours with more impact per hour.”
In any event, the second and third order consequences of this shift will play out in the coming months and years. For example, if you work in tech you now find yourself competing with a global workforce — not only those willing to live and work where you are. And if geography no longer matters that much, why live in expensive cities and have, all things considered, a poorer quality of life? Also, what will this mean for a place like Silicon Valley? Will the networking benefits of being there still hold? Investor Chamath Palihapitiya believes they won’t, and that the most important implication in the US will be in state income taxes. Places like California will have to cut them as educated workers flock to more agreeable places to live.
On the flip side, a significant number of people argue that not everyone wants to be away from the office forever. Or work from a cramped room with kids running around. Surely, but these people seem to be missing the point. Remote and distributed work is about working from anywhere — “home” being but one possibility. Most companies will keep some amount of physical office space, and people will continue to come together. Eventually. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai recent message points exactly at this reality.
At the moment, this whole topic is being viewed from the narrowing lens of a health scare. But it’s really about autonomy and flexibility for people. The pandemic both exacerbated that need, and showed that the world doesn’t implode when people do get it. In many cases, quite the opposite.
The reality is that the essentially creative work a lot of us do requires the very things this shift is enabling — the ability to design our lives in ways that allow us to express our best selves. At work, at home, and anywhere.
3 Articles
✍️ A Few Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Working as a Software Engineer
Having been a software engineer for many years, turning manager and executive has helped me gain perspective. Managers must proactively take in the engineers’ perspective because our role is to help them succeed. In this short but super insightful post, backend engineer Shubheksha Jalan highlights some of her learnings — which to me double as things every manager should be enabling for their people.
✍️ The Magic of Doing $10,000 per hour Work
One of my crusades at work is to protect my calendar and my blocks of personal time to reflect and get deep work done. A lot people don’t realize that time is the only thing you can never get back. If companies had an easy way to measure time wasted, I think it’d be… sobering. This post by Khe Hy is an interesting take on this, getting me to think even more about the value of my own time and how I spend it.
✍️ "Vision" and Prescriptive Roadmaps
Successful product startups inevitably hit a wall on their way to scaling up — the necessary cultural shift from focusing on output (activity) to outcomes (impact). But as John Cutler eloquently reminds us in this post, even if Product Management organizations do this effectively, there’s still a communication gap that must be minded and effectively bridged.
2 Podcasts
🎧 Brian Chesky: These 9 Weeks Were The Most Stressful in Airbnb’s History
Airbnb recently let go no less than 1900 of its employees. No one wants to do layoffs, but as you’ll hear in this episode, Airbnb may just have set a new bar on how to do them as humanely as possible. Brian Chesky’s letter to the employees made the rounds for all the right reasons and in this conversation with Kara Swisher we get a lot more detail on his thought process, how and why things happened the way they did. The really fascinating thing for me is how he systematically defines the principles that will guide his decision-making. Inspirational leadership.
🎧 Jeff Lawson – How to Build a Platform
It’s been fascinating to see the rise of a handful of companies that are literally laying down the infrastructure of the digital age. Twilio is one example, and Jeff Lawson is easily one of my favourite CEOs. Here I particularly enjoyed his take on company values, and how most companies squander their developer talent by not truly tapping into creativity (hint: give them hard problems to solve instead of tasks).
1 Book 📚
Maybe it’s because I recently watched The Last Dance (and loved it), or because I’m a sucker for sports coaches books. Either way, Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings popped back into my mind.
I love to try and deconstruct great performance. I am fond of extremely successful yet low-key people. Phil Jackson fits that bill, having won no less than 11 NBA titles as a coach (and 2 more earlier as a player). But the spotlight was always on the players.
As I was transitioning into an engineering leadership role a few years ago, I looked for inspirational leaders I could model. I couldn’t really find those models around me at that time (not fully anyway) so I did what I always do: I looked for them elsewhere, in books and videos. Jackson was one of my first inspirations (alongside Coach Wooden and Coach K) and Eleven Rings had a major role in shaping my thinking on what great leadership looks like.
Jackson brought Buddhism principles into leading his teams but he didn’t stop there. He absorbed and applied ideas from Native American tribes, jazz musicians, Abraham Maslow… the list goes on. It reinforced my belief that you can find knowledge anywhere and everywhere; that the best insights often emerge from connecting far-flung dots.
In the beginning of the book, Jackson presents his eleven principles of mindful leadership (one for each ring). Introducing them, he writes:
You won’t find any lofty management theories here. With leadership, as with most things in life, the best approach is always the simplest.
We tend to forget this. I tend to forget this. His principles are well worth reading and I’ll leave that to you in case you choose to pick up this book.
Reading it myself, a few of his teachings became foundational to my leadership practice. That does not mean I am able to embody them all the time, or apply them perfectly. It means they’re aspirational — I strive to practice them every day, and get ever closer to doing them well.
First, as a coach or manager, you cannot force your will on others. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves. Sometimes, this is about shaping the environment around your team, making it easy to do the right thing. Other times, it’s about shining a light on a situation and its consequences, in a nonjudgemental way.
Second, Jackson was moved by watching young men bond together, focusing on something great than themselves. His biggest gift was the ability to make incredible teams out of a bunch of extremely talented, but often very egocentric individuals. A big part of that was treating everyone fairly but not equally for everyone is different. For example, Dennis Rodman was a bad boy who always delivered on the court as long as he was sometimes allowed his excesses off the court.
Finally, we can only hope to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. Jackson believed the ride would be a lot more fun that way and his resumé as the most successful NBA head coach ever speaks for itself. One key aspect of creating the conditions for success was process. Jackson’s key basketball strategy was the Triangle Offense which he inherited from his mentor Tex Winter. It’s a simple (but not easy) system practiced to perfection in which everyone knew exactly what they had to do. Yet, it allowed the players to express themselves and win relentlessly.
I love when success is attained by doing the right thing. And I love that success transcends the game itself. As Jackson writes:
What matters most is playing the game the right way and having the courage to grow, as human beings as well as basketball players. When you do that, the ring takes care of itself.
It sure did. Eleven of them, no less.
🙌🏽 Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and until next week.
👉 You can follow me on Twitter @prla