Scott Berkun Goes Pantless, That Mother******!

I had to, I’m sorry.

I found a very old interview featuring Scott Berkun who was asked the following question (and his response):

Which words or phrases do you most overuse? 

My friends would say its mother*****r. But I don’t think this word can be overused.

My type of guy.

Well Scott, a prolific author and team lead at Automattic, is writing a new book called A Year Without Pants and I can’t wait to read it.

With all the talk about working remotely and distributed companies this book is finding a lovely spot in terms of timing and should be a breath of fresh air.

And it still surprises me that people still believe that you can’t have a working and successful company without a physical office. In fact, just last week I had someone say this in a comment:

Still, I’m not sure that our technological liberation will necessarily change the fundamentals of business that much.

The mavericks — the lone operators — have more options and greater reach, but significant businesses will still require offices, employees and everything that goes with that.

Wow, that couldn’t be more wrong. Scott’s even covered some of the 100% distributed companies that are very successful and are making a serious “dent in the universe” – like these 20 or so companies:

1. 37Signals
2. Automattic (120 employees)
3. Genuitec
4. GitHub (100 employees)
5. Kalypso LP
6. MCF Technology Solutions
7. ProofHQ
8. Treehouse
9. Copyblogger (source)
10. YouNeedABudget
11. StackExchange (50/50)
12. MySQL (70/30)
13. GrantStreet
14. SoftwareMill
15. Mozilla
16. 10up
17. Art & Logic (70 employees)
18. AsmallOrange
19. LullaBot (35 employees)
20. AppendTo (23 employees)
21. UniversalMind (65 employees)

And to be honest, for the longest time even our company and team here at 8BIT and WP Daily was 100% distributed – and it worked and we’ve grown and become more successful.

To each his own, to be sure, as culture drives a big part of whether or not a distributed company can survive and is the right model, but to say that a business can’t be successful without an office is absurd given the existing technology and resources made available.

So three big cheers to working without pants and to hell with those mother******* that say otherwise. Can’t wait to read Berkun’s book! Read more of Scott’s thoughts here in this recent Harvard Business Review article.