Author: Scott Berkum
Publisher: Jossey Bass
Reviewer: Carolyn Hughes, PR account manager, Fourth Day PR
The Year Without Pants is part-memoir and part-management style guide. The author Scott Berkum was previously a manager for Microsoft but was asked to manage a team at Automattic– the company which runs WordPress.
WordPress is one of the most well-known web companies with around 100,000 new users signing up every day. What follows is a fascinating account of what it’s like to work at Automattic, which is completely at odds with the way other businesses are run. Its 120 employees work from home (or where ever they like) and launch new services and upgrades a number of times a day, without any marketing or press.
It’s refreshing – not to mention highly unusual – to see a business which focuses on its services and not on profit. In fact, profit seems to come second, or maybe even third, behind service offering and employees.
But the culture that has evolved from business leader Matt Mullenweg is so strong that it holds the teams together, despite the fact they are geographically spread across the globe.
While it couldn’t possibly work for every company, there are certainly useful management tactics that can be drawn from this account. It’s definitely a good debate to challenge the standard 40 hour, nine to five working week which seems quite irrelevant when we are all so connected now.
Scott Berken doesn’t gloss over the negatives that crop up from this style of ‘un-work’, which include more difficult tasks not being tackled in favour of easier ones.
As a WordPress fan myself, I massively enjoyed this account. Scott Berkum’s writing style is conversational, peppered with insights and thoughts.
I find a lot of business books eke out one point laboriously over many chapters, but the fact this book has a genuine story and a timeframe makes for a good pace and is an all-round good read.
