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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
The Year Without Pants summary
Scott Berkun
Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
13 mins
Table of Contents
The Year Without Pants
summarized in 7 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 7
If you want your employees to be independent, hire people you can trust.
If you’ve browsed the web, you’ve seen the name WordPress. It’s among the most popular blogging platforms available.
WordPress.com was started by Automattic, one of the most famous web developers in the world.
They’re known for their awesome team spirit and flexible working environment, which attract developers from all across the world. Getting a job there, however, isn’t easy.
Automattic places heavy emphasis on hiring precisely the right people for the job.
At other job interviews, you might face abstract questions designed to test your problem-solving skills, such as: How many ping pong balls can you fit into a 747?
Not at Automattic. Here they prefer to concentrate on assessing the concrete skills you’ll need to do your job. So, interviewees are instead tasked with completing a small project, using the tools and techniques that would be available to them if they joined the team. This way, only the people who can actually do the job get recruited, not the ones who are best at interviews.
After recruitment, Automattic ensures that staff are immediately trained in the most important area of the business: customer support.
With any new job, people can concentrate so much on their own little world that they ignore the wider goals of the company. To counteract this, Automattic starts their employees off in customer-facing roles, where they learn that the client is all important.
The author, for example, spent his first weeks at Automattic as a Happiness Engineer. Each day was spent dealing with customer problems in different areas of the company. This ingrained in him the knowledge that, wherever he worked in the company, the needs of the customer would always come first.
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What is The Year Without Pants about?
The Year without Pants offers an intimate look at life inside one of the most successful tech companies out there: Automattic, the brains behind sites like Wordpress.com and Polldaddy. By thinking outside the box, abandoning tradition and cutting the fat from your processes, you too can follow Automattic’s example and jumpstart innovation.
Best quote from The Year Without Pants
Founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems.
—Scott Berkun
Who should read The Year Without Pants?
- Entrepreneurs from any industry
- Start-up CEOs
- Employees in tech industries
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