Quotes from Scott Berkun

The staff at WordPress.com call support "Happiness." Therefore it's not the support team, but the Happiness team. And people who work in support aren't called tech support staff; they're called Happiness Engineers (HE).

After years of leading projects, the best thing I've learned is that I have to periodically shift between thinking small (bazaar) and thinking long term (cathedral).

To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion. All the rational people, despite their brilliance, are too reasonable to start crazy things.

I'd take a great team with bad methods over a lousy team with great methods any day.

It's deep in human nature to look to the top to define our own behavior,

management is seen as a support role. The company stays as flat as possible for this reason. Schneider described his philosophy in this way: 1. Hire great people. 2. Set good priorities. 3. Remove distractions. 4. Stay out of the way.

creativity is rarely efficient. It always involves taking chances and trying things that might work but might not. The question then is: are we willing to spend time to be interesting, to think interesting thoughts and make interesting things? We all have the power, but perhaps not the willingness.

It's a hidden, and often scary, cost of rebuilding something: even a perfect improvement reveals old issues hidden by the mistakes of the past.

In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct."[

you can look inside yourself and find strength to make choices you believe in, even if others do not agree with those choices.

he possesses uncommon patience. He rarely checked his phones or gadgets. When he was in the room, he was fully present and generous with his attention. He listened. More so, he was an amazing manager of his personal time and attention.

remote work, and many other perks [..], will work or fail because of the company culture, not because of the perk itself.

It's easier to get feedback and make adjustments with how a team works if you're in the same room. Feedback is hard to come by in life at all.

Not being able to look folks in the eye in tough situations feels wrong. Would you propose marriage to someone online? Or tell a child her mother was dead in a text message? I worried that what made me good at work wouldn't transfer to a completely online environment.

four big personal questions I asked everyone in e-mail once a month: What's going well? What's not? What do you want me to do more of? What do you want me to do less of?

I recall the moment I hit the existential crisis many in support hit of asking the universe, "Where are all the reasonable people?" and realized the answer was that many reasonable people don't contact support. They get answers from friends, coworkers, or by using the free documentation they find online.

Making everyone work in support forces everyone to take customers seriously, which we should since they pay our salaries.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

To work at a remote company demanded great communication skills, and everyone had them. It was one of the great initial delights. Every corporation has the same platitudes for the importance of clear communication yet utterly fails to practice it. There was little jargon at Automattic. No "deprioritized action items" or "catalyzing of cross functional objectives." People wrote plainly, without pretense and with great charm.

little things done well consistently can have big effects—has merit.

They decided to force customers to answer three good questions: What did you do? What did you see? What did you expect? These are clever queries. They're often the first questions anyone doing support or first aid might ask someone in trouble.

critical path is the shortest sequence of work that can complete the project.

Here's why famous experts who write books never go back to regular jobs: regular jobs are hard. Regular jobs mean you answer to others. Regular jobs mean you do regular, and often repetitive, things. Regular jobs mean you are not the center of attention and have to follow rules made by other people.

Experience benefits only those who take the time to learn from it.