A great talk given by writer and former WordPress manager who describes how WordPress (the company) works in his new book ‘My Year Without Pants.’ It will challenge a lot of your ideas of how technology can help your small business (for example, they use no e-mail at WordPress.)

Scott Berkun lecture In Seattle, 19 Sep 2013

I wanted to bring this to your attention not as some pie-in-the-sky ‘management’ blather, but because the office environment Scott describes is very close to how we have worked here since arriving in Seattle in 1996 and we have always gotten lots of puzzled questions about how we can operate in such a ‘de-centralised’ fashion. The fact is, we don’t. We have a very ‘structured’ organisation. But as Scott points out, ‘structure’ and is not the same thing as ‘physical proximity.’

As more and more of you look to streamline to compete in tougher and tougher markets, Scott’s ideas are food for thought.