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Scott Berkun Quotes

Total quotes: 9
“The most dangerous tradition we hold about work is that it must be serious and meaningless.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: The Future Of Work, WordPress
“The honest test of the value of any management activity is to run projects without some of them and observe how well people perform with a lighter touch. It’s a test few leaders have the courage to take.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: Leadership, The Value Of Management, WordPress
“The problem with problem-solving methods, which all business methodologies are, is that they are abstractions, but the world is not abstract. Real work contains hard parts that no method can dictate for you.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: Problem-Solving, Problem-Solving Methods, Real Work, The World Is Not Abstract
“People who love great things but are ignorant of how they’re made are mystified by how dirty they have to get their own hands to make anything at all: they think the mess means they’re doing something wrong, when mostly it just means they’re finally doing real work.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: Craftmanship, WordPress, Work
“One major mistake Schneider had seen was how companies confused supporting roles, like legal, human resources, and information technology, with product creation roles like design and development. Product creators are the true talent of any corporation, especially one claiming to bet on innovation. The other roles don’t create products and should be there to serve those who do. A classic betrayal of this idea is when the IT department dictates to creative what equipment they can use. If one group has to be inefficient, it should be the support group, not the creative. If supporting roles, including management, dominate, the quality of products can only suffer.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: The Future Of Work, Product Creators, Support Roles, Organizational Structure, WordPress
“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, often repetitive, things. Regular jobs mean you are not the center of attention and have to follow rules made by other people. Anyone who’s an expert, guru, executive or coach has likely lost any real sense of what real work is. We assume that because we can give advice on something, we are superior to those who take the advice, but that’s not true.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: The Future Of Work, Business Experts, Bad Advice, Business Books, WordPress
“What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all? If you're the kind of person who loves Seaside or the place where you work, you don't need it to be any bigger than it is. The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: Business
“Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal. For example, if you tell me my job is to cook the french fries, I will resist anything that threatens the existence of french fries, since when they go away, so does my job. But if you tell me my job is to make side dishes for customers, I'll be open to changing from fries to onion rings or other side dishes, even ones we've yet to invent, since my identity isn't tied to a particular side dish but instead to the role side dishes play. Bureaucracies form when people's jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress
Tagged: Against Bureaucracy
“It takes more passion to choose, on your own, to build a website, a mobile application, or a company than to follow years of instructions to get a degree. A GPA is not a strong indicator of passion, except for the dubious motivations of wanting to find the right answer to other people’s questions. Degree programs are highly structured and have the greatest appeal to people who depend on structure.”
— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
Tagged: Entrepreneurship, College, College Degree, Skip College, Startups
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