Quotes from Scott Berkun

Self-motivated people thrive when granted independence. Managers who want better performance must provide what their staff needs.

The first day of a new team on a short deadline is fascinating anthropology. Everyone tries to figure everyone else out—who is talented, who has the same taste, who is easy or hard to work with, who has status—all at the same time they're trying to figure out the project itself.

Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

If you want longevity, you can't just bet on tradition; you have to continually invest in the future.

Most of the work of project management is correctly prioritizing things and leading the team in carrying them out.

As a rule, everyone who launched something was expected to stay online for a few hours to ensure things went smoothly.

GitHub has always been a fully distributed company, naturally reaching many of the same conclusions as Automattic about autonomy, empowerment, and trust.

Ambiguity makes everyone tolerant of incompetence.

If you'd like to be good at something, the first thing to go out the window is the notion of perfection.

Remote work demands social proactivity.

The absence of a grand schedule removed the constant fear of falling behind that many projects create and replaced it with small but frequent payoffs that we were making things better.

Being a good lead is all about switching hats: knowing which level of abstraction to work at to solve a problem. It's rarely a question of intelligence; instead, it's picking the right perspective to use on a particular challenge.

A major reason it works at Automattic is belief in a counterintuitive philosophy: safeguards don't make you safe; they make you lazy.

Patience is a manifestation of trust. It conveys to the other person that he or she is worth the time.

Someone has to define what we're trying to get to and clarify which ideas are both more and less important in completing that vision.

For all of the strengths of WordPress's bazaar culture, its user experience lacked the grace and clarity a cathedral architect would naturally provide.

There is nothing wrong with tradition until you want progress: progress demands change, and change demands a reevaluation of what the traditions are for and how they are practiced.

we are always performing. Any time you open your mouth and expect someone to listen, you are behaving differently than you would if you were alone. Admitting this doesn't make you a phony — it makes you honest. We are social creatures and behave differently to fit into different social situations.

It's only when something is burning that you find out who people really are.

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."1 But the past is unevenly distributed in the present too.

truths are discovered by breaking rules: you need to break some to learn which are just for show and which ones matter.

The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones.

Often I made a teamwide bet about one of the data points we were going to collect to help keep us interested.

Starting a company, or even a project team, is an exceedingly hard challenge, but in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems.