Quotes from Scott Berkun

If I started a rock band or a company, I'd want to share the same physical space often. The upsides outweigh the downsides. However, if the people I wanted to work with were only available remotely, I'm confident we could do great work from thousands of miles away.

forcing function is anything that — when put in place — naturally forces a change in perspective, attitude, or behavior. So, schedules are important forcing functions for projects.

Laughter paves the way for many things.

Laughter leads to running jokes, and running jokes lead to a shared history, and a shared history is culture.

One side effect of having teams is there will always be things that fall through the cracks. Teams create territories.

Permission, on creative matters, is for cowards.

Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal.

Until you work backwards from the moments, hours or days before the actual mistake occured, you probably won't see all of the contributing factors and can't learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back you'll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation.

Persistence at a poorly defined problem is futile, and talent applied to an unsolvable problem is worthless. The challenge is knowing how to define problems with enough constraints to help creativity, but not so many that creativity, or any solution, is impossible. Mastering this skill is one secret that explains who successfully makes things and who doesn't.

There's a degree of control that the filter of technology gives you—a control that introverts often prefer.

the more complex performance reviews become, the less effective they are.

Politics is a kind of problem solving. No matter what organizational challenge you face, and how frustrating it might be, it's just another kind of problem to solve.

Succession planning must be part of any long-term leader's thinking, and it has to be done now.

Where are all the reasonable people?" and realized the answer was that many reasonable people don't contact support.

It's foreign to us, and our faith in hierarchies, but science bears out emergent intelligence as fact.

Changing a name doesn't change reality. But I withheld judgment. The wise engage all new things with an open mind. I wouldn't learn anything new if I judged them before getting my hands dirty, despite how much more fun judging things with clean hands can be.

Remember that culture changes the value of tools: for example, if you have a team of people who hate each other, they will make each other miserable no matter how many billions of dollars of communication technology they use. Alternatively if you have people who trust each other and have similar goals, they'll be effective with smoke signals and carrier pigeons. Wars have been won by tightly knit armies using candles and Morse code.

Lame visions have no integrity: they don't offer a plan, and they don't express an opinion.

While we have a universal measure of wealth called money, there is no comparable measurement for meaning.

In any organization, large projects require leverage, but few employees have any. People who have grand ideas but little influence wonder why no one supports them. They think the lack of support is a judgment on their ideas rather than the politics of authority.

It's the mistakes you make before you even say a word that matter more. These include the mistakes of not having an interesting opinion, of not thinking clearly about your points, and of not planning ways to make those points relevant to your audience. Those are the ones that make the difference. If you can figure out how to get those right, not much else will matter.

Data can't decide things for you. It can help you see things more clearly if captured carefully, but that's not the same as deciding.

Things that are less fun to do are usually harder to do, which means the pile isn't ordinary work but a pile of unloved, unwanted, complex work: 1. We do things we like first. 2. We do things we don't like last. 3. The things we don't like tend to be harder. 4. Late changes have cascading effects.

A good sign as a leader is when output is high and meetings are short.