Booked

Author and former Microsoft manager Berkun spends a year working at Automattic, the company behind blogging site WordPress, in this entertaining insight into life at an innovative technology firm.

Among the practices he finds are that: employees work remotely, from anywhere in the world; nobody uses email, preferring customised blogs and online chat; there are no schedules and very few meetings and rules and; workers launch new ideas and features on a daily basis.

The central theme of this book is that work should be fun and meaningful. It is only in recent history that work has lost these elements, he argues.

In the centuries of civilisation prior to this, many of us had crafts and skills that gave us pride in our work and only a few progressive companies are open to the idea that technology can help return some of the meaning of work that we have lost, he says.

Because of Automattic’s open source roots and vision for democratising publishing, meaning was easy for Berkun to find and while he acknowledges that few organisations have roots like these, he argues all leaders can choose to make decisions about their goals and ways of operating.