sberkun10's comments

Here's a handy guide I wrote for how to learn from your mistakes:

http://scottberkun.com/essays/44-how-to-learn-from-your-mist...

The direct answer is most managers have no experience managing remote workers. Certainly that's not the entire story but it's a new way of working and many organizations reject it for its novelty without understanding it's advantages or what investments have to be made to get them.

I worked for Mullenweg for a year at WordPress.com to write a book about all of these questions. It documents all the tools I used and what life was like as a remote manager of a development team.

http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Futur...

You can read a free chapter about culture from the book here:

http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excer...

Absolutely. My point was it has been studied, by anthropologists, for years, but our field has great hubris of inventing everything for ourselves (this hubris has some advantages of course, but when it comes to reusing existing knowledge it's a big disadvantage).

A minute of of google searches would reveal papers and books about the anthropology of work, including office work and even studies specific to modern tech work. There are even classics in the field, such as The Psychology of Computer Programming, by Weinberg, which despite the title, has many elements of anthropology in it - a book published in 1971.

We agree. I wrote:

"You have to do careful study to filter out which cultural values remained immutable over time, if any at all. Ask the first ten employees to leave a successful company why they left, and many will answer “the company changed.”

You have the benefit of retrospection with those companies - In year 1 or year 5 it was (likely) far less clear what the company would look like in 50 or 100 years.

It is also a matter of perspective - as an outsider to any organization the perceptions we have of culture are different than what it's actually like inside. 3M in particular has gone through many cultural changes, including the ones that led to peaks in innovation (see: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/3M-Company/Infor... on McKnight circa 1950s) and low points (see http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-06-10/at-3m-a-strug... McNerney, circa 2000s).

So we're talking about two sides of the same kinds of coins - yes some elements are stable, but it's hard to sort out what they are, and it depends heavily on whether you are an outsider looking for examples, or an insider actually trying to get something interesting done.