The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun

Author:Scott Berkun
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

Late in the morning, we met for a long breakfast outside. I had clear ideas for how the meet-up should go, and with the first night out of the way, I wanted work to begin. However, with Mullenweg there, it seemed best to follow his lead about what form that work should take. As rare as it was to work in person, team chats with Matt were rarer, and that deserved priority. In the beautiful outdoor garden behind our hotel, with views of the Parthenon, we sat at a long wood table, enjoying a delightful brunch buffet. The conversation rambled at high speed like a happily drunk speedboat at sea. We had no agenda and no one tried to create one. No one took notes except for my occasional list making in my notebook.

Meetings at Automattic were always qualified disasters. They happened so rarely, certainly in-person ones, and had so little urgency there was little pressure to get better at running them. Most of the world has deadlines. If you don't have deadlines, the need to be good at efficient decision making fades away. Without schedules and budgets, there were rarely decisions with permanent consequences, and Mullenweg made most high-stakes decisions. As a result, meetings followed the same rambling style as P2 conversations did, with few rules. On a P2, anyone can raise any comment at any time, and everyone else is free to ignore it or respond to it. There were rarely hard end points and little interest in finding them. One school of meetings is to simply list an agenda of questions so the meeting has a spine to hold it together, but the meeting that morning didn't have one of those either.

As we relaxed in the warm Mediterranean sun, we jumped between discussions of company strategy, to coding methods, to feature ideas, to bugs we'd seen, to gossip about other teams, and back again. It was fun and inspiring. At the most primal level, this was good-natured smart people who care about the same things talking with each other—the kind of chemistry that executives spend careers trying, and mostly failing, to create. And beneath it all was the sensation of Athens. Who has team meetings in Athens? Who gets on a plane to meet with coworkers in ATHENS? It was continual background energy for the whole meet-up, the visceral sense we were all together in a good place, with good food and quality of work life in every way provided for us. It never entirely made sense to me why we were there, but the effect of it was clear: we were all energized, inspired, and ready to earn our trip to an amazing place.

My immediate challenge was doing my job as lead inside the chaos. The dialogue was great, but as the person accountable for making sure Team Social shipped good work, the increasing number of open threads made me uncomfortable. As I explained in previous chapters, ideas were not our problem. A countdown clock was ticking in my brain for when to force major decisions to closure.

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