What is it like to work at WordPress.com, the 8th most trafficked website in the U.S., where everyone works from home, no one uses email and dozens of improvements launch to customers every day?
The Year Without Pants follows my story of getting hired, my weeks on the front lines of customer support, and the year I spent leading a team of brilliant programmers designing and building new features for WordPress.com. You’ll get a unique behind the scenes story, where I share everything I learned about creativity, productivity and leadership from the kind of workplace that might be in everyone’s future.
What others are saying
“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.”
—Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss
“WordPress.com has discovered a better way to work, and The Year Without Pants allows the reader to learn from the organization’s fun and entertaining story.”
—Tony Hsieh, author, New York Times best seller Delivering Happiness, and CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.
“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.”
—Guy Kawasaki, author, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and former chief evangelist, Apple
“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”
—Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times best seller The 4-Hour Workweek
“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.”
—Gina Trapani, founding editor, Lifehacker
Wether you want to make a career in a big company or start your own business to make an impact or to improve your balance, it is important to know yourself, have a solid business proposition and continuously learn and adapt.The Business Model Canvas can help you structure your current career proposition and forms a framework to (continuously) re-invent your career from there. In this 17min session, you will learn why this is important and how this canvas can help you.
That question that we all ask, often when we are just starting out on an adventure. Why is this so important?
This is an exercise driven activity to highlight the critical role of sharing the product vision with the people who are going to build the solution. Work with a team to build something valuable!
As scale and distribution set in at organisations that have strong growth, spreading the lean and agile culture becomes even more important to keep teams aligned and motivated. At Rally, we have fallen in love with A3 Thinking and templates to address this challenge. We do new hire bootcamps, employee trainings and walk the talk, but A3’s seem to be the most effective tool for helping us spread lean thinking and empower teams to share their problems and strategies. This talk will tell our story, challenge the audience and provide some education on these powerful tools for enabling teams to collaborate, steer and take action.
The talk will include a variety of A3’s with our templates and cheat sheets, covering.
How to keep many teams aligned on a common strategy. X-Matrix A3 and Strategy A3’s used to engage everyone in collaboratively planning strategy
How to ensure problem-solving efforts actually deliver results. Problem A3’s used to gain visibility of improvements and associated metrics
How to decide which innovative ideas are worth pursuing. Experiment A3’s used as part of an innovation funnel and horizon planning
How to make agreements on the work clear. Initiative A3’s used to manage significant business and technical work
How to help workgroups become real teams. Team Formation A3’s used to bring people together for a common goal
How to make it all work. Challenges and real world learnings
