Liam Martin - Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the Worlds Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers

2022 Liam Martin and Rob Rawson

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ISBN 978-1-4002-3215-4 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-3214-7 (HC)

Epub Edition May 2022 9781400232154

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936276

Printed in the United States of America

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To Daniel for helping us make this book a reality.

To Marielle and Marina, who have been such a

massive support throughout this book and our lives.

And to Fahim, who inspires us to continue to work

on helping the world transition to remote work.

E ver wonder what it would be like to live through a real revolution?

Were talking about a historic upheaval where old boundaries are destroyed, whole lifestyles and industries are overturned, and most of all, a new mindset is born, one that makes the recent past seem utterly, hopelessly archaic.

Well, youre in oneand its bigger than you think. The far-reaching implications that our epoch will ultimately have on the thing we call workwhat its for, how its done, what it feels likeare nothing short of the biggest change to our lives since the advent of electricity.

Here is the kickerit isnt just about working remotely.

True, its no secret that the world has gone remote in the steepest, fastest, most disruptive way imaginable. In the wake of humankinds first global pandemic since the invention of the computer, a giant portion of the working world flipped to remote with lightning speed, as one corporate giant after another announced that theyre going all-remote, going hybrid, or offering sustainable remote options. In fact, even many sizable entities that grew and thrived in the traditional on-premise modelDropbox, Microsoft, Apple, and so many othershave ultimately embraced permanent work-from-home, and many of them will never open an office again.

The fact that these changes are rapid and sweeping is obvious. What hasnt been as well understood is just how radical is this shift in mindset.

Where and when people work are not even half the story.

Thats why this book isnt merely about remote work. Its about a whole new way that any company can work. It unveils a philosophy and methodology first discovered and developed by organizations well before COVID-19 hit. These organizations were the first to embrace the remote challenge. The question these frontrunners posed was simple: What if you could work with people all over the world, but you could never meet with anyone in person?

The answers they uncovered were groundbreaking, counterintuitive, and will likely transform the way we workthat is, the way everyone worksfor all time.

THAT SINGLE LIMITATION little to no in-person engagementforced these remote-work pioneers to develop what we call the Async Mindset, relying on precise communication, highly developed processes, and irrefutable metrics. Put together, doing things the async way yields a surprising number of benefits, including hyper-growth and radical scalability, global hiring freedom, elimination of single points of failure, and much, much more.

Without ever really setting out to, the remote pioneers created a powerful model for how every contemporary business can operate and compete, whether in an office or not, computer-based or not, international or not.

In fact, the Async Mindset is a reimagining of the very meaning of work, with the accent shifted toward the centrality of deep focusthe stuff that creates productivity, clarity, measurability, scalability, and, yes, even human happiness.

As Marc Andreessen, world-famous tech investor, recently wrote in a blog post, remote work may be a permanent civilization shift... a consequence of the internet thats maybe even more important than the internet itself.

Like the birth of agriculture, the printed word, manufacturing, and industry, the rapid adoption of the Async Mindset is not just a trend, its one of the major reboots in human history, likely to affect everything in its wake.

Once you get the mindset in place, the method quickly follows. One things for sure: Its going to affect the way you do business.

The Async Mindset may have been birthed by the pioneers, but make no mistake, its not just for the coders, the techies, or the so-called knowledge workers. Its a giant leap toward greater work sanity for everyone.

Whether youre running a fleet of trucks, a hospital emergency room, or a radish farmeven if youre the sole proprietor of a one-person operationyou have priceless lessons to learn here. The Async Mindset is about building replicable processes that give innovators, employees, and teams real autonomy. The Async Mindset is also about eliminating managerial waste, useless hierarchies, and vanity metricsthe demons that bog down every kind of operation.

Async is the wave of the future, for most organizations. Whether you deploy these lessons in an office is utterly beside the point.

Asynchronous Management: The practice of leading individuals or teams without simultaneous or synchronous communication. All collaboration and information are funneled through online systems. Work focuses on individual autonomy, allowing all team members to maximize their own productivity without being dependent upon others to complete a task or provide updates. Asynchronous management requires process documentation, asynchronous measurement of goals, and the discipline to optimize work efficiency.

Its no accident that experienced, remote-first companiesthose organizations who choose to work remotely as their primary modeare some of the fastest growing entities of the last decade, with team members reporting greater-than-average commitment and satisfaction, and profits going through the roof. To cite just one startling example, Coinbase, the first company on Nasdaq to list its location as nowhere, debuted at $65 billion with an implied market capitalization of about $141 billion as it entered the S&P 500 at number 89. The wildly successful cryptocurrency exchange platformstarted in 2012 by a former Airbnb engineer and, ironically, a former Sachs traderis a harbinger of things to come.

To underscore what we mean, here are some stats we found about remote-first companies in the aggregate.