Notes

Introduction

1. Office Space is a 1999 American satire of typical mid-to-late-1990s work life, starring Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston.

2. People Operations is a functional group that includes HR, company culture, and employee engagement.

3. E. E. Cummings, E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (New York: October House, 1965).

Chapter 1

1. Woody Leonhard, Underground Guide to Telecommuting (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

2. Annamarie Mann, “Why We Need Best Friends at Work,” Gallup.com, January 15, 2018.

3. Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, “Our Work-from-Anywhere Future,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future.

4. “Listicle” is an article based around a list.

5. Matt Mullenweg, “Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy,” Matt Mullenweg, April 10, 2020, https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/.

Chapter 2

1. Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi (New York: HarperOne, 2004), 252.

2. C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

3. Daniel Goleman, “Leadership That Gets Results,” Harvard Business Review, March–April 2000.

4. Yes, that is a pun for Ed Sheeran, the famous British pop singer who is most famous for his 2017 song “Shape of You,” and Led Zeppelin, the English rock band formed in the late 1960s.

Chapter 3

1. We recommend a synchronous meeting unless your team is performing at level four or five on the Five Levels of Autonomy.

Chapter 4

1. Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew, and Dan Klores, “‘What did we just watch?’ The bronze that broke USA Basketball,” ESPN, August 30, 2019, https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27462338/what-did-just-watch-bronze-broke-usa-basketball.

2. Patrick M. Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, J-B Lencioni Series (London, UK: Jossey-Bass, 2002).

3. Bruce W. Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” Psychological Bulletin 63, no. 6 (1965): 384–99.

4. Bruce W. Tuckman and Mary Ann C. Jensen, “Stages of Small Group Development Revisited,” Group and Organization Studies 2, no. 4 (1977): 419–27.

5. A type of organizational structure where a person reports to two or more leaders.

6. Jason Fried, “How We Structure Our Work and Teams at Basecamp,” Signal v. Noise, November 17, 2016, https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-structure-our-work-and-teams-at-basecamp/.

7. You can pull from the RW Team Mission Statement here. For functional-based teams with isolated workflows, expand the definition of success away from individual work. Make the goals more about how you can support each other in the reasons why your team exists.

8. Tim Bontemps, “Born from the Fires of 2004 Failures, Team USA Basketball Now Built to Last,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2016, https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/olympics/ct-usa-basketball-built-to-last-20160721-story.html.

Chapter 5

1. USA Memory Championship, About, https://www.usamemorychampionship.com/about/.

2. Molly Talbert, “How Work about Work Gets in the Way of Real Work,” Asana, March 21, 2020, https://asana.com/resources/why-work-about-work-is-bad.

3. “Dogfooding” means using your own product or service.

Chapter 6

1. Susie Cranston and Scott Keller, “Increasing the ‘Meaning Quotient’ of Work,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 1, 2013, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/increasing-the-meaning-quotient-of-work.

2. “Becoming Superhuman,” https://www.becomingsuperhuman.science/.

3. Sahar Yousef, PhD, The Science of Productivity and Performance in Our Busy, Always-On World, https://hr.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/science_of_wfh_productivity_and_well-being_-_now_conference.pdf.

4. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013).

5. Tim Urban, “100 Blocks a Day,” October 21, 2016, https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/10/100-blocks-day.html.

6. Shishir Mehrotra, “The Color-What-Matters Calendar Guide,” Coda.io, https://coda.io/@shishir/color-what-matters-calendar.

Chapter 8

1. Wah-wah is the noise of a sad trombone; you can also interchange it with boo-hoo, like a kid crying.

2. Julia Sklar, “‘Zoom Fatigue’ Is Taxing the Brain. Here’s Why That Happens,” National Geographic, April 24, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/coronavirus-zoom-fatigue-is-taxing-the-brain-here-is-why-that-happens.

3. Susan Weinschenk, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2011), 68–69.

4. Vinh Giang, https://www.vinhgiang.com/.

Conclusion

1. Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It, trans. C. D. N. Costa (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).