If the Shoe Fits: The Lean Startup’s Office Optional Conference
by KG Charles-HarrisA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
Yet again Sarah Milstein and her crew at Lean Startup have knocked it out of the ball park. The first time I experienced it was at their Lean Startup Conference last year. With the new Office Optional Conference, they have tapped into a motherload of issues that affect the Future of Knowledge Work and Workers. Companies both large and small are struggling with attracting, growing, retaining and managing distributed teams, just like an increasing portion of the workforce is enticed by the ability to work from home (or anywhere).
I attended with Galina Landes who leads our engineering team, and one of the great experiences was to see how differently she and I experienced distributed work and strategies for improving what we’re doing. But then, engineers have always had a more logical approach to most things than those of us working in management or other functions in a company. Combining our perspectives and discussing strategies was interesting and very productive.
This conference on distributed teams dealt with collaboration, communication and the tools necessary for achieving goals as a team and creating a positive work environment. I’ve personally struggled with this in my previous company and now as we are building a new one. Our small team is fully distributed, although several of us are in the San Francisco Bay Area and can meet face to face when necessary. But it’s still challenging to build a company culture, have good communication and trust without which we can’t achieve our strategic goals.
Personally, I got a lot of ideas for tools and strategies to enhance our collaboration and communication. In addition, many of the speakers spoke about the need to create an environment where “water cooler talk” and informal communication (and interruptions) was acceptable. Just like in a normal office environment. After all, we human beings are (mostly) social creatures and need to create bonds and trust with those with whom we work to achieve goals.
It was a pleasure to see that so many people from large organizations such as GE to small startups like EMANIO, and everything in-between, dealing with the issues around an increasingly distributed workforce. In interacting with fellow participants, it was clear that we were all neophytes in the area and even those organizations that successfully had deployed a distributed model were still learning and adjusting their strategies and methods. Office Optional was a great learning experience and I’d exhort anyone dealing with these issues to participate next time they put it on. It was invaluable for us.
My only negative feedback would be that toward the latter part, the speakers became a bit repetitive. However, for a first conference small issues like this should be expected and judging from my prior experience with the Lean Startup team the next one will excellent.
The day ended with a conversation between Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup, and Stanford’s Bob Sutton, who penned the No Asshole Rule, and more recently, Scaling Up Excellence. Though the conference would have been very good on its own, this was the crowning part of my experience. Professor Sutton is an engaged and charismatic speaker with deep knowledge of how organizations work. Excellence is what we’re all striving for and he provided a captivating roadmap for how to achieve it.
Image credit: HikingArtist
