Remarkable Reading #39: REMOTE: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson and PROMOTE YOURSELF: The New Rules for Career Success by Dan Schawbel

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Two Trends we'll be touching on are:

1. The future of the office in a vast & fast changing millennial powered & focused smart world
2. How to promote yourself in a 21st century job market for job satisfaction and decipher the changes to your advantage

I have worked in an office for over 16 years of  my life, and have loved spending quality time within project management, product development, and research management.

I also love sitting in a nice WiFi enabled coffee shop and blogging on my own.

Both are different, and in within that you have an idea of the changes that are happening.  Whilst one required teamwork, face-to-face communication in person, strategy & planning as well as building a human rapport in person over time, an individualistic task like blogging requires someone to be completely alone with their laptop and write away with only a WiFi connection needed.

I believe the office will have a valuable space as we move forward, but it will be flexible with variety.  There will be  tasks that can be done in the office, and there will be tasks where employees, may perhaps, be allowed to work from other environments such as a nice coffee shop near the beach, provided the work gets done.

This imperative really relies and depends on trust.  Without sturdy and hefty trust between employers and employees this will never work.  But the change in mindset with Millennials is evident - flexibility, variety, a mix of tasks, springy and hefty working hours and working venues as well as a more solid and dense schedule is perhaps one of the models of the future.

Start-up companies especially are lucky in the sense they perhaps sometimes, have flexibility to begin with, and are able to have different working arrangements and timings.  This mantra may carry across to big businesses.

The value & benefit of a office still remains for valuable face time, however, whether it is something that is required 5 days a week 9-5 is what will be scrutinized further and further in the 21st century.  Efficiency, vibrancy, respect, trust and progress is what the future is built on.

REMOTE: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is a pioneering and innovative new book exploring the brave new world of the Wifi enabled virtual office.  It puts forth a strong argument against the contemporary office set up, and asks the right questions about today’s modern workforce scenario.  How many hours do we need to work in the office?  What are the benefits of working in the office?  How productive are we in the office & what are the core advantages and disadvantages of the modern day office?

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are impeccable models for writing this book as they’ve clearly experienced working in the modern day office in an era of decentralization, and experienced the benefits of a virtual and wireless office.  The work-life scenario will continue to take a radical reshape and reformation over the next consecutive decades REMOTE: Office Not Required  provides us with a foundation for how we can continue to evolve these this reformation.  If you are someone who is entering the workforce or a senior manager in charge of a team of employees  REMOTE: Office Not Required is transformational in providing you with the right framework for success in 21st Century Business.

A few top takeouts include:

Page 4 - “A brave new world beyond the industrial age belief in The Office.  A world where we leave behind the dusty old notion of outsourcing as a way to increase work output at the lowest cost and replace it with a new ideal - one in which remote work increases both quality of work and job satisfaction”

Page 7 - “Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work - this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone.  But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found.  Instead, it’s just one interruption after another”

Page 10 - “Let’s face it: nobody likes commuting.  The alarm rings earlier, you arrive home that much later.  You lost time, patience, possibly even your will to eat anything other than convenience food with plastic utensils. Maybe you miss the gym, miss your child’s bedtime, feel too tired for a meaningful conversation with your significant other.”

Page 11  - “According to the research, commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce”

Page 16 - “The beauty of relaxing workday hours is that the policy accommodates everyone - from the early  birds to the night owls to the family folks with kids who need to be picked up in the middle of the day”

Page 62 - “All you need is confidence - confidence that you see a smarter way of working even when everyone else in your industry is sticking to business as usual.  That’s how great ideas evolve from being fringe crazy to common knowledge”

Page 71 - “This is a key reason so many people get so little done in traditional office setups - too many interruptions.  Still, when you’re used to this mode of working, it can seem  hard to envision a world where you can't get an answer to any question, no matter how insignificant, the second you think of it.  Such a world does exist, though, and it’s quite habitable”

Page 94 - “Working remotely can provide a terrific boost to productivity.  Fewer interruptions, more work done ! But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Eight hours straight of work is no utopia managers might think it is.  We all need mindless breaks, and it helps if you spend some of them with your team.  That’s where the virtual water cooler comes in.”

Page 116 - “”Freedom is slavery” wrote George Orwell in his novel 1984 . Let’s completely misappropriate that iconic banner and apply it to what happens to remote work if you don’t manage and work-life balance correctly?

Page 122 - “Modern office culture has never been conducive to a healthy lifestyle.  Get up in the morning, commute to work, sit in a chair for eight hours, then return home to the couch and TV - no wonder people have been getting fatter.  But it can get worse!  If you’re not making a conscious effort to the contrary, working from home will likely afford even less opportunity to hit your recommended 10,000 steps per day.  At least, by travelling to an office, you have to walk to your car or to the train station or, even better, ride your bicycle.  And, of course, in a conventional office, everyone walks around a little, seeking out those in other departments.  And there’s always the dash across the street to lunch, and maybe even some steps logged on the way home”

Page 180 - “Just because you work remotely most of the time doesn’t mean you have to, or should, work remotely all of the time”

Page 203 - “Working from home offers you far greater freedom and flexibility.  That might seem like an enviable dream to anyone stuck in a cubicle, counting down to the minutes until the workday is officially over, but the reality is not quite so clear-cut.  Without clear boundaries and routines, things can get murky”

Page 219 - “Creative work that can be done remotely generally only requires a computer and an Internet connection.  The computer you can bring with you, and nearly anywhere in the world you’ll be hard-pressed not to find an Internet connection.  Remember, the work doesn’t care whether it’s being done on a bench in Maui or a boat off the coast of Tampa (3G and LTE connections are plenty fine for most purposes”

PROMOTE YOURSELF: The New Rules for Career Success by Dan Schawbel is the ideal book for understanding the metamorphosis that we’re currently undergoing in the business world due to advanced in The Internet of Things, mobile devices and social network services - it’s a potent combination for change.

This means that we will have to adapt, transform, learn, relearn and unlearn in order to continue to survive and enhance further.  

Combining hard-facts with relevant representative cases is a rare trait that Dan Schawbel has as an author who genuinely comprehends and understands what you need to do in order to achieve success in this fast-changing world.  His comprehensively thorough knowledge of Millennials, and what they would like to aspire & achieve is a revelation as much as it is a declaration.  Millennial values will differ significantly in terms of what we are currently used to.  Their notions and ideals may even challenge the fabric of how we do business right now.

Dan Schawbel is a faultless and impeccable writer in terms of capturing where the current overarching trends are in the work force.  His hard facts back his trends, and this ensures that PROMOTE YOURSELF: The New Rules for Career Success  is a business book that you should at least read once in the next five years.  It underpins subtle nuances that we've perhaps missed in understanding the linkages of change between social media, work-life balance, education, skills and technology training interspersed with spectacular research facts - get PROMOTE YOURSELF: The New Rules for Career Success right away.

Key take-out’s include:

Page 3 - “The challenges of rapid globalization and constant technological disruption in the midst of a global economic downturn that has tightened if the credit markets and slowed down mergers and acquisitions has put companies under any of the same pressure that their employees under, They need to grow from within, and the only  way they can do that is with you”

Page 5 - “Lessons learned: If you work really hard, make yourself an expert on something, and pursue your passions, you will be able to achieve what you want”

Page 14 - “Chances are you won’t be at the same job your entire career. So we’ll talk about how to assess whether to stay with your current employer or move on; what to do if you hate your job but can't afford to leave; how to handle recruiters, ask for a raise, and much more”

Page 17 - “We are Millennials.  We are highly million strong and we’re taking over the world.  I am fully confident that this generation will transform business as we know it for the better.  We’ve lost trust in organizations, we’re pushing them to align with social causes, and we want them to support our local communities.  We aren’t fond of corporate hierarchies and don’t want to feel constrained by a nine-to-five workday”

Page 20 - “Gamification in the workplace is already starting to gain traction now but will become standard in the future  Gamification is a new way to train and develop employees using games”

Page 21 - ‘So instead of traditional office space, we will have social spaces customized to our own needs”

Page 23 - “We believe that promotions should be more aligned to accomplishments and results instead of based on age and years of experience”

Page 25 - “Thanks to a tough job market, student loans, debt, low starting salaries, and a low savings rate, it’s going to take us longer to reach adulthood than previous generations.  We’re getting married, buying our first homes, and having children later than our parents did. Millennials are living on their own after starting their career”

Page 28 - “When it comes to thinking about a satisfying career, there are also three critical factors, but in this case you need all three to have a fulfilling career: Passion, Strengths and Markets”

Page 44 - “Now Netflix has to compete with the nearly endless supply of free media streamed by companies like Hulu and YouTube.  Charles Darwin captured this idea perfectly when he said, “It is not the strongest of species that survives,  nor the most intelligent, but the one ,most responsive to change”

Page 58 - “Smart companies have learned that in order to attract and retain young people, they have to provide opportunities for advancement.”

Page 79 - “Being able to produce well-structured, intelligent, concise, written materials that people will want to read is essential”

Page 145 - “The majority of people my age, in their fifties, who are in leadership and in many cases senior leadership roles in organizations don’t really use these technologies or they say it’s stuff that their kids use,”: says Carlos.  “The numbers in the last report I read still show that about a third of the Fortune 500 block social media sites from the corporate Internet”

Page 174 - “One of the biggest problems I see with Gen y worked is that they sometimes have a kind of workplace ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) - if their needs aren't being met right now, they’re ready to jump ship”

Page 209 - -”The trick is to turn your passions into your job.  It’s not always easy, but it is possible”

Page 230 - “Optimism and self-confidence are great qualifies for intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs alike.  But they can easily turn into naivete if you don't have a backup plan”

Page 236 - “Intrapreneurship is the wave of the future, and it’s how companies will remain competitive, innovative, and attractive to young workers”

Page 255 - “Do not steal company contacts and information, and do not burn bridges with the people you work with, as you might need them as you build your company”

Both books are interlinked in terms of 21st Century technology trends in business and are heavily and highly recommended for an up-to-date account of the impact on the work-life balance, the office, skills & superskills, use of technology to enable change and productivity.

You can follow Jason Fried on Twitter here, purchase a copy of REMOTE: Office Not Required here, and visit his website Basecamp here.

You can follow David Heinemeier Hansson on Twitter here, visit his website here, and follow him on Instagram here.

You can follow Dan Schawbel on Twitter here, visit his website here, read his blog here, connect with him on LinkedIN here, and finally purchase a copy of PROMOTE YOURSELF: The New Rules for Career Success here.

Thank you,

Praz aka Prashant

LinkedIN