The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & the Future of Work
An Amazon.com Best Book of 2013.
What happens when an old-school management guru leaves the books and lectures behind to lead a young team at a revolutionary company, with no email, no offices, and no rules? The answer is an amazing and entertaining book about the future of work.
Automattic, Inc., runs WordPress.com, the 15th most popular website on the planet, and is the leading organization behind WordPress, the software that powers 20 percent of the entire web? 60 million sites and counting. Their success is based on challenging our biggest assumptions about how work is done:
- Employees work remotely, from wherever in the world they wish
- No one uses email, preferring customized blogs and online chat
- There are no schedules, few meetings, and fewer rules
- Workers launch new ideas and features dozens of times a day
In The Year Without Pants, popular author and former Microsoft manager (’94-’03) Scott Berkun reports on his challenging year working at WordPress.com as the leader of one of its most important teams. His bold and entertaining tale is filled with great advice for managers, executives, and employees alike about how great work is done and what Automattic’s success means for the rest of us.
With his legendary humor and the unique perspective of a seasoned outsider-turned-insider, The Year Without Pants is the best book you will read on the ways leadership, productivity, and work are evolving on business’s brave new frontier.
Bonus Resources
Author, New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”
Professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss“The Year Without Pants is one the most original and important books about what work is really like, and what it takes to do it well, that has ever been written.”
Founding Editor, Lifehacker“With humor and heart, Scott has written a letter from the future about a new kind of workplace that wasn’t possible before the internet. His insights will make you laugh, think, and ask all the right questions about your own company’s culture.”
Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and Former Chief Evangelist, Apple“The underlying concept an ‘expert’ putting himself on the line as an employee is just fantastic. And then the book gets better from there! I wish I had the balls to do this.”
Founder, GigaOM“The future of work is distributed. Automattic wrote the script. Time for rest of us to read it.”
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