The future of work?

This week I have been reading The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun. This is one of those rare beasts – a book about management and leadership that had me engrossed in every word.

The book is Berkun’s account of working for Automattic, the company that built and runs WordPress. It’s really about how someone with a traditional management background at Microsoft coped with leading a team of techies at a company with no email, an open vacation policy, no offices and few conventional rules.

It is a fascinating insight to a futuristic work culture that many of us would love to experience.

There are no formal interviews for jobs in the company and they are not interested in CV’s. Automattic hire via a trial process doing real work with real tools. If you do well, you get hired. Simple.

Induction? Like all new Automatticians, Berkun spent his first few…