David Burkus - Leading from Anywhere

Copyright 2021 by David Burkus

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Names: Burkus, David, 1983 author.

Title: Leading from anywhere : the essential guide to managing remote teams/ David Burkus.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020044142 (print) | LCCN 2020044143 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358533276 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358573777 | ISBN 9780358573807 | ISBN 9780358533382 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Virtual reality in management. | Virtual work teamsManagement. | Leadership.

Classification: LCC HD30.2122 .B87 2021 (print) | LCC HD30.2122 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/022dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044142

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044143

Cover design by Pete Garceau

Author photograph courtesy of Daniel Folkers

v1.1220

To everyone still working from a cubicle.
Freedom is coming.

W HEN HAYDEN BROWN assumed the role of CEO of Upwork on January 1, 2020, she probably never imagined her first year would go quite like it did.

Upwork, a billion-dollar company, was created when Elance and oDesk merged to become the worlds largest platform for finding and working with freelance talent. Prior to 2020, most of the companys employees already worked remotely from eight hundred cities around the world. The company had several traditional office locations for employees who werent ready for remote, but even the office receptionist was a virtual employee who managed multiple front desks from her home office. Under the leadership of Browns predecessor, Stephane Kasriel, the company that managed the worlds largest pool for remote talent had operated as remotely as it could.

Or so they thought.

When a novel coronavirus started spreading rapidly across the globe, Brown and her leadership team found themselves in the same position as many other senior leaders. They had to decide how to respond. They had to figure out how to keep the business operating while also ensuring the safety of all of their stakeholders. But unlike a lot of companies, they didnt decide to send everybody home for a short-term, work-from-home experiment. Instead of a short-term pivot, they saw it as time to commit.

They had done the research. They had been a supporting pillar in the remote-work movement for long enough, but just kept hanging on to their office space. It was time to finalize the inevitable transition to becoming fully remote.

Building on our 20 years of experience as a remote-work company, we are now permanently embracing a remote-first model. Going forward, working remotely will be the default for everyone, Brown posted on Twitter, ending her post with The #futureofwork is here.

This is a book about that future. Or, perhaps better stated, this is a book about the past, present, and future of remote teamsand how you can thrive in your role as a leader in that future.

Its difficult to trace the origins of remote teams. On some level, theyve always been a reality. The Roman Empire stretched across three continents, but Caesar had to settle for roads and messengers. At the height of its colonialism, it was said the sun never set on the British Empire, but Queen Victoria had to keep it all together using ships and trade routes. Even in the relatively short history of the United States, circuit riders coordinated to preach across the growing country and traveling salesmen went door-to-door even before the automobile to maximize revenue for their companies and themselves.

But when we talk about remote work and remote teams today, most of us are discussing the movement away from the traditional office. And if thats our frame of reference, then we should probably use 1973 as our official start date. That was the year Jack Nilles published The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff. Nilles and his coauthors were convinced that the rising problem of traffic congestion wouldnt be solved by widening highways. Instead, they saw it as a communication problem that technology was rapidly solving. They argued that companies could help ease the traffic problem by shrinking the size of their headquarters and building an array of satellite offices scattered at the edges of their home citywhich isnt all that different from remote workers scattered around an array of local coffee shops today. There werent any personal computers at the time, and the coffee wasnt as good, but Nilles and company believed that mainframe computer technology and existing telephone lines were sufficient to coordinate work remotely. Nilles even coined a term for this: telework.

The advocates for telework only grew stronger as technology advanced and computers shrank in size. In 1989, Charles Handy argued that personal telephones signaled the beginning of the end for large offices, writing, Link it to a laptop computer and a portable fax, and a car or a train seat becomes an office. In 1993, fellow management thinker Peter Drucker declared, Commuting to the office is obsolete. But corporate leaders must not have gotten the fax. And if they did, giving up their corner office wasnt something they wanted to rush into. Instead of an office-less revolution, the percentage of remote workers increased slowly. It grew most quickly among tech firms, perhaps because of their familiarity with the very tools needed to more effectively collaborate from afar.

In the past decade, two big events shaped the debate about remote teams and whether working from home was actually just a form of barely working. The first occurred in February 2013, when newly appointed Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer sent a companywide memo declaring the end of remote work for the company. We need to be one Yahoo! the memo read. And that starts with physically being together. Many companies followed suit. Hewlett Packard, IBM, and even Best Buy (previously known for its Results-Only Work Environment) all called their remote teams back from home to the home office. In lieu of working remotely, many of these same tech companies increased their lavish spending on workplace perks designed to not so subtly encourage employees to focus more on their work and less on worrying about the outside world.

And so the remote-work revolutions pace slowed to a crawl. By 2018, only around 3 percent of American employees reported that they worked more than half of their hours remotely. The march toward remote work was still growing, but much more slowly than before.

Then, suddenly, it got an unexpected push. The response to the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic practically brought the world to its knees, but it brought movement toward remote work to an all-out sprint. At the time, moving everyone rapidly to remote teams was reactionary and likely seen as temporary. But having sampled the benefits of remote work, most people dont want to go back to the office any time soon.

A survey conducted by IBM during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic found that more than half of employees want remote work to be their primary method of working, and 75 percent said theyd like the option to continue working remotely at least some of the time. And many companies have responded in kind. Partly out of safety concerns and partly in response to what they discovered during their forced trial of remote work, many companies announced that they would give employees the ability to continue working remotely long after efforts to flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases was over. Citigroup, one of the worlds largest banks, told its people that most of them would be staying out of the office for nearly a year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went even further, announcing that likely half of their 48,000 employees would shift to remote work permanently. (The Facebook announcement is particularly ironic, because during the height of the office perks trend, the company spent more than $1 billion and hired renowned architect Frank Gehry to create the largest open office floor plan in the world.) Like Hayden Brown, Shopify CEO Tobi Ltke announced that Canadas most valuable company would become a digital-by-default company. Theyd keep some of their office space for some operations, but the move to remote was permanent. Office centricity is over.