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Regarding the principles: >> 3. Writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations. 4. Written down processes over on-the-job training. 5. Public

Regarding the principles: >> 3. Writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations. 4. Written down processes over on-the-job training. 5. Public sharing of information over need-to-know access. 6. Opening up every document for editing by anyone over top-down control of documents. 7. Asynchronous communication over synchronous communication. These remote work principles have the direct, or side effect of breaking organizations that are "moral mazes," and hyper political bureaucracies. The reason organizations suck is because managers just talk instead of producing data, which is basically conspiring to steal value instead of creating it for the organization. I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others. At one site, I literally stopped answering my phone for anyone I didn't directly work for, because I knew those people were just using the verbal channel to create uncertainty about what was said and leverage the resulting confusion. The WIFO rule solves a lot of org problems. (write it, or f-off).

andycowley 7y ago
So much this. I left my last employer because of just this. A 'fat waist' of middle-management that delivered no value and created nothing but inertia. Major incidents were a shambles of managers demanding updates over a conference call while engineers couldn't communicate effectively. Ugh
pfranz 7y ago
> I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others. I know this misses your point, but both at work and outside I've gotten into the practice of emailing immediately after a phone call with a summary of the phone call. It's kind of a lawyerly thing to do, but it's a contemporaneous documentation of the phone call you can point to later.

andycowley 7y ago

So much this. I left my last employer because of just this. A 'fat waist' of middle-management that delivered no value and created nothing but inertia. Major incidents were a shambles of managers demanding updates over a conference call while engineers couldn't communicate effectively. Ugh

pfranz 7y ago

> I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others. I know this misses your point, but both at work and outside I've gotten into the practice of emailing immediately after a phone call with a summary of the phone call. It's kind of a lawyerly thing to do, but it's a contemporaneous documentation of the phone call you can point to later.