The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers by Liam Martin, Rob Rawson

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers by Liam Martin, Rob Rawson Learn success secrets from original remote work pioneers on the mindset and strategies they developed to build and grow successful organizations from the ground up. With the unprecedented rise in remote work due to the pandemic, many businesses have struggled with how to effectively transition to a distributed format. Meanwhile, companies who had always been remote-first had a unique advantage: a highly scalable set of work processes, a unique communication style, and the proper “async mindset” required to succeed without an office. This groundbreaking guide unlocks the secrets and the lessons discovered by those pioneer entrepreneurs and founders who have figured out how to harness the async mindset and grow their businesses remotely in the most the seamless, freeing, and cost-effective ways. Once you accept and master some fundamental differences, remote work can fuel higher productivity, eliminate time-wasting meetings and treacherous commutes, and strip away the ugly politics that often undermine the most talented employees. It also leads to great cultural inclusivity and richer cultural exchange. Running Remote is for ventures of all stripes—companies small and large, one-person operations, mom-and-pop shops, and global mega-corporations. The lessons herein are as valuable for on-premises organizations as they are for the tech worker. Readers will: Master the fundamentals of the async mindset by exploring three overarching principles—deliberate overcommunication, democratized workflow, and detailed metrics. Learn nuts-and-bolts techniques and real-life lessons from remote work trailblazers who built successful all-remote organizations prior to the pandemic. Gain a better understanding of why hiring, on-ramping, and managing in a remote context is totally different—again with methods and first-hand stories from the founders and leaders that did it first. Learn how moving to a remote business model impacts traditional management and work processes.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey welcome to the show we certainly appreciate you guys we've got an exciting guest with the newest book coming out we're going to be talking about lots of fun stuff with business and life and remote work,

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Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big LinkedIn group of 120,000. Join that thing and the big LinkedIn newsletter that's so popular. Check that out as well. So today we have Liam Martin on the show with us today. He is the author of the newest book coming out August 16th, Running Remote, Master the Lessons from the World's Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers with his co-author, I believe, Rob Rawson. He is joining us today. We're going to be talking about his book and also a conference that

he has coming up that he's working on. He is a serial entrepreneur who runs Timedoctorandstaff.com, one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference, Running Remote. Welcome to the show, Liam. How are you? I'm pretty good. Thanks for having me. Awesome, Sauce. It's wonderful to have you.

Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the new book. Give us some dot com so people can find where you want them to get to know you better on the interwebs. Sure. Best spot would be runningremotebook.com, obviously, where you're going to be able to learn about the thing that took the last year and a half of my life to be able to put together. But then outside of that, on all the socials, I'm at Liam Remote because I've been doing remote for almost 20 years and definitely was doing it before everyone thought it was cool. Yeah, I've been doing it since, what, 2014?

Once I got rid of my last partner, I didn't, I couldn't afford not to deal with them anymore. And then when everybody joined me in 2004, did I say 2014? 2004. And then when everybody joined me in 2020, I was like, hey, I've been here. This isn't new. You guys are just joining the crowd. And then they all went back to work or whatever. So let's talk about your new book.

What motivated you to want to write this book? So around February of 2020, just to kind of set the stage, 4% of the U.S. workforce was working remotely. By March, that was 45% of the U.S. workforce. That's the biggest transition in work since the Industrial Revolution. But Industrial Revolution took 80 years and we did that in March. So a complete transformation of everything that we know, not just about work, but the way that we interact with people, the way that you interact with your office environment, that local coffee shop down the street. And I started getting phone calls from people that were not the regular people that would call me. I remember about a week into the pandemic, I had a call from a G20 country and they said, we have 540,000 employees. We made

them remote yesterday. How do we do it? And I said, I have no idea. I've got 200 people. That's a completely different world for me. And they said, you're the first guy that we've been able to get on the phone. There was absolutely no one that understood how to be able to manage remote teams pre-pandemic. There was only a very small group of people, me included, that were really passionate about this stuff. And then I thought to myself, what's the best way to be able to do this? It kind of felt like everyone was drowning and I had like a proverbial life preserver. But then I thought, okay, well, a book could be the best way to be able to make this happen. So spent a year and a half writing

the book, wanted to write one that was really going to be useful for people instead of telling them whether they should be using Zoom or Google Meet. And it's coming out August 16th, as you said. There you go. Learn success secrets from original remote work pioneers on the mindset and strategies they develop to build and grow successful organizations from the ground up. So this is really interesting because I've never seen a manual put out. I mean, I'm calling this a manual. I don't know if that's the right description. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen something put out like this. That's kind of a thing that can help companies go remote.

I don't think anyone's done that before, have they? There have been a couple of books out in the space, but the first page of this book, and this is kind of a sticking point between me and my publisher, HarperCollins, is they said, well, we need to have remote in the title because this has got to be a book about remote work. But what I teach people on the very first page is it's actually not about remote work. It's about a methodology that was built out of the remote pioneers, which I'm calling asynchronous management, which is a very weird concept. It's the ability to be able to manage people without simultaneously or synchronously

interacting with them. And I know that that's a little bit difficult for people to get their heads around, but effectively what this does is it allows you to be able to have a company that effectively manages itself. And once you can get there, then you can really scale your organization.

That's pretty, I like that term. That kind of puts your head around it from a different angle. It makes people understand that you can really scale your organization. That's pretty, I like that term. That kind of puts your head around it from a different angle. It makes people understand that you can still manage people even though they're not under your thumb, basically in the office. You know, it's still possible to manage. It's still possible to lead, et cetera, et cetera. So what are some tips or teasers you want to tease out

about the book that can entice people to pick it up? Sure. So, I mean, the biggest thing that I think everyone needs to really take into consideration is it's not about the tools that you use, right? So that's the question that I would get absolutely every single time is, is it Zoom? Is it Google Meet? Is it Slack? Is it Microsoft Teams? If you're asking that question, you don't actually know the question that you should be asking to get the right answers to the problems that you're looking for. So you're in a pretty bad spot. Asynchronous management is really the system that all of these companies built. And we've looked at companies like Coinbase and WordPress and Lab. These are multi-billion dollar, deca-billion dollar companies that have no

offices. And more importantly, those people don't actually spend eight hours a day on Zoom. They actually spend maybe one hour a week on Zoom interacting with their fellow team members because they recognize that just being present doesn't actually mean that you're working and they're focusing on output as opposed to necessarily inputs. So there's three core tenants, pretty simple, deliberate over-communication, democratized workflows, and detailed metrics. Deliberate over-communication, don't make instructions easy to understand, make them impossible to understand, get better at writing emails, make it very clear for everyone to understand, make them impossible to understand, get better at writing emails, make it very clear for everyone to understand that information, democratized

workflows, everything that can be documented and digitized should. So we have this concept, which is you should always respond with a link. So if someone asks you a question in the company, respond with a link to show them where the answer is so that they're not talking to you and they're actually looking at your wiki or your internal process documents. And then third, detailed metrics. Don't fall into the 20th century trap of having all of these kind of mid-level managers

focus on measuring how well you're doing in an organization. That's 20th century thinking. You can actually automate all of that. You can create detailed metrics. You can make them automated so that managers can focus on EQ issues, soft skills, as opposed to whether or not you fill out your TI-83 report. Hey, folks, this is a quick break in from the show. Hey, be sure to check out my new courses at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. That's chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com that's chris voss leadership institute.com forward slash courses or you can just click the courses tab you can see we've got new courses up for how to start a podcast and video training that can get you up to date on everything we're doing of course my

speaking my coaching and everything else but be sure to check out the new course that we have up for starting your own podcast after 13 years i'm kind of sharing some of the secrets of what I know. So be sure to check that out at chrisfossleadership.com forward slash courses. You know, it's interesting you say that people shouldn't spend eight hours a day on Zoom. That was one thing that I noticed a lot of my friends were complaining about online that went remote is they're like, holy crap, I'm doing like 12, 15 Zoom calls a day. And people were starting to get what you would call Zoom burnout because they're just like, holy crap. And you saw a lot of comedians, of course, doing the thing. There's the one comedian who runs around where he's wearing a green screen.

He's football games and boxing and stuff. So you're not a big fan of the Zoom burnout sort of thing where it's just constant Zooming all day long. Well, Zoom fatigue zoom fatigue is real but more importantly what's the one thing that you can't do while you're on zoom do any work you're just preparing yourself to do work right so there's a there's a theoretical framework from my friend cal newport who wrote this great book called deep work and basically the concept of deep work is, do you have everything at your disposal to be able to solve a really hard, difficult problem? So do you have the information in front of you? Do you have all your references?

Do you have your mic set up properly? If you're going to do a podcast or something like that, can you be focused in what you're doing? And the issue is that all of these Zoom calls and notifications and can I get five minute pings on Slack or Google Meet or whatever it is, those distractions, they appear like collaboration, but in reality, they're just distractions. And what you really need to focus on is working and actually getting things done, moving the needle forward. So we have a lot of suggestions in the book on how to actually tactically achieve that. But the reality is that it's not about the tools that you use. That's actually the smallest part of the formula, but everyone has that reversed.

There you go. There you go. So send that, send that if you're listening and you're stuck in those eight hour Zoom calls, send this clip to your boss. You know, the interesting thing about asynchronous organizations is I started polling them, and there aren't many of them. It's a relatively new concept because before the pandemic, we were a very small group of people. We were basically maybe under 1,000 companies. And I found out two interesting factoids connected to asynchronous organizations. Number one, they spend on average about 10% of their work week interacting synchronously with other team members. So that means out of their 40-hour work week, they spend four hours

on a Zoom call, sending an instant message back and forth, those types of things. The second thing that I thought was even more interesting is these organizations have a 50% thinner managerial layer than their on-premise counterparts. Basically, what that means is there are more people doing work in asynchronous organizations than there are people managing people doing work in those organizations, which at the core, I mean, means you're going to actually be much more competitive in the marketplace. Yeah. And, and save a lot more money. You know, there's always a thing about having too much middle management. So people that, let me ask you this. Are you a fan of, I know that there's software out there that can monitor time on computer, basically the time that they're, they're kind of checked in and technically working on a computer. Are you a fan of that monitoring software?

I think you should use it as long as everyone has access to it. So what do I mean by that? I mean, the CEO should be using it, the board should be using it, and everyone should have access to everyone else's data. So the concept is this idea called radical transparency, which is effectively meaning everyone has theoretically as much access to information as the CEO of the company. So do you have the same informational advantages as the CEO? If you do, then you can actually make much better decisions and you don't necessarily need to ask questions

to be able to get answers to all of those problems. So internally, it's an open door policy. Collect as much data as we possibly can, as long as one group doesn't have an informational advantage over another, because I think that that can be destructive. That's brilliant. You know, one of the early founders of Buffer we had on the show, and he was one of these early proponents of showing everybody your wage. Like they would publish all the wages of everyone, even himself and the CEO. They would publish them. And, you know, a lot of people when it came out were like, I don't know about all that.

That's taking it a little too far. But I like the peer pressure of that. And also, you don't feel like, oh, the CEO and the board are just running us around like mice. It's like, okay, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. You know, one of my favorite stories years ago was, it's from, I think, a Tom Peters book. And it might have been Tony Robbins. So whoever it's from, my apologies for not getting the reference right. But I believe it was Tom Peters.

There was a board that they couldn't figure out why they couldn't sell their frozen TV dinners and why they weren't selling well and sales were going down. And the CEO forced the board to start having lunches, eating their own TV dinners as opposed to the opulent lunches they were bringing in. And that's when they discovered how awful their dinner food was. And then they started, you know, okay, well, here's the problem. We need to fix it. And so, you know, sometimes until you're eating your own, there's a paradigm that I'm missing somewhere. Eat your own dog food.

Eat your own dog food. Yeah, there you go. Which, I don't know, I buy dog food for my dogs. That gives me cringe right now. But, yeah, and so by seeing that the board and the CEO is doing it, it sets that example of leadership that I like that I wrote about in my book. And it also, you know, it makes it seem like, okay, they're not just running around like mice. Everybody's involved in the gig. There's a peer pressure effect to it. Would a peer pressure effect be a good analogy for that? I think there's an equality.

Okay, equality. No control of one group over another where everyone has access to pretty much everything else inside of the organization. And it also creates a really great environment where when you need to make a difficult decision inside of these asynchronous organizations, the vast majority of the time, everyone understands it because they have the same information that the CEO had. So they're saying, oh, well, you're absolutely right. The engineering department wasn't profitable. And if we don't trim it at this point, we're going to be in serious trouble in the next six months.

So we've got to make a change right now to be able to make sure that the company's okay. And this is something that again when you go back there's a there's a recent article that actually just came out based off a study showing this concept of digital pre-emptism which is effectively saying people spend 67 minutes per day pretending to work to show their managers that they're working and this is a phenomenon that just for asynchronous organizations makes no sense because all that we measure are the outputs yeah what's your goal oh i need to close twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue did you do that yeah i closed twenty two thousand

awesome go home i don't care. Like that's it. That's the goal. And so as long as you're optimizing for those outputs and not necessarily focusing on the inputs or putting more importance on the inputs than really on the outputs, what really matters is do you actually get your work done? This is another kind of issue that we've seen inside of synchronous organizations that, you know, you can have them inside of an office or outside of an office. You can use asynchronous management inside of an office environment without any problem whatsoever. And we encourage people to do it. hear what people are saying to be able to figure this out, usually I'll know whose ideas get adopted inside of that board meeting. And it's usually a six foot five white guy that looks like Captain America. That's generally the guy that always has his ideas adopted properly. Why? Because he's very charismatic and he's able to communicate that charisma at scale to those

people. He's able to convince them of his idea and in asynchronous organizations good ideas have an equal kind of chance at succeeding regardless of whether or not you're charismatic so for me i'm five foot eight wallflower engineering nerd guy that sits in the back and i'm like i don't want to talk to captain america or argue with him so i'm just gonna gonna pretty much go along with what he has to say and and then a bad idea gets adopted inside of the organization inside of asynchronous organizations that really doesn't happen plus plus all the chicks dig captain america guy so you know yes i mean maybe i got a bit of a chip on my shoulder for that but regardless i think that when you see we we talked there's two or three companies

that really hit this on the head when i was interviewing them which was asynchronous remote organizations is really the rise of the introverted leader so the elon musks of the world right the zuckerbergs of the world these are the guys that have really really good ideas but they can't actually communicate those ideas effectively in a charismatic way to be able to bring other people along with them. And I'm not saying that those aren't useful things to do, right? That's a really useful skill set. But in reality, if you're looking at it from an organizational perspective, if you can adopt better ideas more often, you're going to be more successful.

There you go. Biology is biology. That is interesting what you say about Mark Zuckerberg and the introverted leader. You know, we talk about leadership a lot on this show. Is one of the things that helped them be more successful is that they have, well, they don't only have more extroverted people around them. I think for Mark, he has, well, he had up until recently, who's the leaning gal? Oh, Sheryl Sandberg. Sheryl Sandberg, who, you know, has some charisma as opposed to him. I can't think of anybody who surrounds Elon Musk. What is it that makes them excel at leadership?

I'm very curious about how you brought that up. I think, and I can only speak for people that I've met. I don't know if it's gone to jail in the next couple months, but we'll see how that works out with Elon. I think that when you look at leadership, it's really focusing on the passion of the organization. So there was another really great quote from Amir, who is the founder of Doist. And it's a task management app that has tens of millions of users all over the world, incredibly successful company. And he said, at Doist, we focus less on the people and more on the work. That's our company culture. So what do you want to actually do in this organization? How do you want to put a dent into the universe? Let's focus on that as your core passion.

Let's make you absolutely cult-like committed towards the things that we're trying to change in the world. And if you're so incredibly focused on that, then the interpersonal skills don't necessarily matter as much. They still do, absolutely, but we communicate it a little bit differently. So instead of, as an example, me getting into a big boardroom and talking with everybody at the same time, maybe I'll make a video and I'll post it up as an unlisted video on YouTube

and I'll send it to everyone inside of the organization so I can really get my ideas and communicate that passion across to people. Build out our, you know, our mission statement, what we're really excited about for us. We're trying to help the world's transition towards remote work. We're doing that pretty well because numbers are up. We're not entirely saying that it was our fault, but you know, remote work is going up quite a bit and we want to be able to continue on with that.

And we only want to recruit people that are as passionate about that subject as us. If you can solve for that, pretty much everything else solves itself. You know, I, that, that was my number one thing for leadership that I wrote about passion. If you, to, to be a really effective leader. And I was writing about leaders like Steve jobs and other people who really inspire people and passion and can take them to that next level where they'll move mountains for you. They'll do anything for the vision, the passion of the leader. And that's where you really see yourself. So I'm glad you brought that up. There was something you mentioned else there that I want to touch on. Do you use YouTube videos to sell your ideas as

opposed to sending out all the email people have to read then? So we'll use a couple of different project management systems. Email is still one that we use day in, day out. No one's come up with a better version of email. Unfortunately, we use project management systems like Basecamp or Asana. We also use tools like Loom or Vidyard, which allows you to be able to grab your screen and your video and make like a quick five to 10 minute video off the fly. And then it turns it into a bitly link and you can send it off to people. But if I'm really trying to address the entire organization, I'll make a video and we'll have it professionally edited. We'll go through all the bells and whistles to be able to make sure that that is something that's worthy of the organization. We really kind of treat the communication that we have with the team as much as we give it the same weight as if we were communicating to our customers because they are our customers, right? They're our internal customers. They're our employees.

Yeah. I mean, people always ask me how I got good at podcasting and why I got into podcasting. And I was like, you know, I've always been the promotional guy. I've always been the CEO of my company since 18. So I learned. I have to sell to the employees. I have to sell to the board. I have to sell to the vendors.

I've got to sell our customers. I've got to constantly be selling the vision of what we're doing. But I really love that idea of sending out, you know, video memos as opposed to, you know, sometimes when I'd make a policy or I'd have to make, it's like, okay, well, we have a new rule, kids, you know, don't steal from the supply closet, you know, and I'd always feel like I was barking out orders, you know, because it's like, here's the barking idiom from above from idiot boy, you know, whatever,'s like, here's the barking idiom from above from idiot boy, you know, whatever, you know, here he, here he, I always felt like a, here he, here he, the man in the tower says you must all do this and F you all. And so I like the video aspect of that because

you can deliver really the tone of your message or you really can't do that in the policy. know some people read it and be like oh i hear chris's voice and that some people read it and be like that he's turned into a psychotic authoritarian you know that's well and and also as it applies to the third concept of the book running remote detailed metrics allows for you to be able to figure out how often are people watching this video? Are they re-watching certain sections? Did they watch the entire video? Did they only watch half of it? And this is not a critique of those team members. That's a critique of you. You didn't make a good enough video. You need to make something that's more entertaining or more engaging for those internal team members so that they're really excited about watching the next thing that drops

from them again we treat it more like a marketing exercise for an internal team as opposed to an afterthought you know maybe maybe the future for youtubers is becoming ceos you know because they're good at making videos you know i think when you look at a lot of those big youtubers i'm sure they're incredibly passionate about something. And to your point, I mean, putting people along, right, putting that dent in the universe is incredibly difficult to do. And you need to be incredibly passionate about that subject. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. So if you've got, you know, 10 million subscribers on YouTube, you must have been doing something right.

That's true. Maybe, maybe they can be in the future. They can be advisors to CEOs because you know, how do we do something that's appealing? And then you get a video from your CEO and you're like, why is he eating Tide Pods? So I had to, I had to somehow squeeze that joke in there. So there you go. I mean, that, that, that does make sense. I love that idea. It's a brilliant idea. What do you see? Everyone right now is trying to consult with a crystal ball and say, are people returning? Do people want to turn? My prediction was, knowing myself from me never wanting to go back to an office, I did so for a short term for some investors in our Las Vegas mortgage company where I was going

to the office and hated it. So that was there. What do you see happening with remote work? Are employees going to keep digging in their heels? We've seen some top executives at Apple and other people digging their heels and go, no, we're not going back to your way anymore. Well, there was this thing called the great Resignation that still hasn't stopped. And the primary reason why is worker mobility, because we've recognized that work is no longer a place, something that you can take with you. So I'm not going to work in New York anymore. I'm going to work in Idaho, as an example, because I can pay for, you know, I can spend that $8,000 rent on that tworoom apartment in Manhattan and get an absolute mansion for the same price. Or I can go to Bali or I can go wherever the heck else I want. So I think that's one really important factor that should be paid attention to. But there's actually a brand new data set that came out just last week from the U.S. government showing that we're at about 30% of the U.S. workforce working in part remotely at this point. And the number is starting to pop back up. So we've effectively achieved zero point. There's less than 10 percent of the U.S.

workforce that is working from home due to the pandemic. So 90 percent are doing it in a premeditated way, which is very exciting for me because basically means that we're going to go back up. And I would project that we'll be at 50 of the population working remotely definitely within the next five years and i might even put money down in the next three years because we're seeing a really interesting phenomenon occur there are people that work completely remote there are people that work completely from the office and then the big chunk is hybrid workers the people that work two three four days at home and then the rest of the days they work from the office they do not like that the data

is very clear that they're doing it because the managers are dragging the back again those managers that effectively know that they're redundant in this process i think they know and that's why they're trying to get everyone to come back to the office. But they're really saying to themselves, you got to get back to the office. You know, you were more productive in the office. Well, what do you mean? My last quarterly report showed that I was just as productive at home as I was in the office. Well, you know, it's about culture. Well, how's the culture doing? How's our EMPs doing? Here's our MPS doing? Are we, you know, are we shipping everything? Am I happier working from home? All of these factors are going to be really kind of coming to a head in the next couple quarters. So I would see the hybrid part of remote work, which is the majority, 60 to 70%,

compressed down into, we're going completely back to the office or we're going completely remote. And based off the data that I'm seeing, more people are pushing to completely remote than back to the office. Wow. I really think so. I mean, I'm more productive, you know, and I wrote about this, you know, my first CEO that I had that I learned the most from right before I started my big company was he would show up to work in shorts and a t-shirt and he would usually have a food line down the front of the t-shirt. He had kind of a pot belly. And I asked him, I've got everything with the pot belly right now.

Yeah, there you go. I'm preaching to the choir. And, and he, and I asked him one time, I go, how come all of us wear suits around here and,

and you get to show up just however you want. And, and it, are you more effective that way? He goes, Chris, I work like 12, 18 hours a day at my company. He goes, look at my accountant. He wears a suit. He's all buttoned down. He's on his fifth bypass. Seriously, he was going out to the surgery for his fifth bypass and quadruple bypass, fifth quadruple bypass. And can you have a fifth quadruple or is it a fifth, fifth top? Anyway, there's a joke there somewhere. So he said, you know, I'm more effective working this way. And I thought it was kind of, I was kind of like, I don't know, I'll buy it.

But once I found that, you know, once I started my companies and started working my tail off, I realized that I'm more effective doing that. I'm more effective not being in drive time. And, you know, regardless of what's happening in the environment, like right now, high gas prices, I mean, it's almost, it's almost cost ineffective for people to drive to work. It's like you spend half your day's salary in gas. I mean, that looks like it's going to go down over time, but you know, it's, it's, it's a thing where you ask, but you know, it's, it's, it's a thing where you ask people, you know, it's, do you want to stay home? And people are like, I stay home. I'm better. You know, I've been, I've seen friends posting and LinkedIn postings

where people are like, here's how much I spend in gas. I spent four hours of my day in drive time going back and forth to work, stuck in traffic, you know, especially in places like LA or Dallas or New York. And to me, getting that four hours back is better lifetime. You know, it's better value. And so, yeah, I see people resisting it and then finding companies maybe that read your book or follow those sort of idioms that can be more successful. And they find that they're just going to go find a company that will accept them and can do remote work efficiently. That's my- Yeah. It does require a shift. And when we switched to remote back in February of 2020,

I called it emergency remote work, right? It was remote at gunpoint. You have no choice. We must go remote today because the world was collapsing in on itself. So no one really had the training going into this, which was very frustrating for someone like me that saw everyone drowning. And I only I had that proverbial life preserver, which I've now turned into a book. But the reality is that when you look at the phenomenon of 20th century MBA thinking, the concept of collaboration is a really important one to be able to bring up as well. So you touched on this. Everyone pays a sunk cost to get into the office. I'm going to spend 90 minutes of my workday getting in a car, on a bike, in a metro, whatever, come to this one place. And then when we come there, everyone can collaborate now for free, right? Because you've already paid the cost of getting there.

But asynchronous remote teams, we pay that cost every single time we meet. Every time we jump onto a Zoom call, we have to pay that cost. So now we can actually have more of an a la carte method, which is, well, should we meet today? Should we not meet today? One of the things that I encourage people to do as like a first step inside of their asynchronous management journey is prepare themselves for an async week. So everyone in the company doesn't talk to anyone else for one week. And there's a couple pieces that you need to assemble, process documentation, all that kind of stuff to be able to make that work. But when we've run these experiments for the book, I have,

and I've run it 12 times, I have yet to have one single company say it was a bad idea. Everyone loves async weeks. I got twice as much work done. I was so much more productive. My manager wasn't bothering me. You know, those are the things that you really kind of need to be able to think about. And I just ask those managers, run an experiment. Let's play with the data a little bit here. Let's send out an anonymous survey afterwards and see what people think. People love it because they know it actually makes them more productive. You know, it's interesting to me. When you mentioned that, I was thinking of the TPS report thing from Office Space, the movie, where, you know, the boss would come around every five minutes and, you know, your TPS report. He's like, you know,

you spent way too much time on this TPS report thing, man. You just, if you would leave me alone for a little while, I could probably get that thing done. And so that's, that's reminded me of that. You know, the other thing is too, is, is I had read that, I don't know if this is a continuum, but I read when people first started coming back to the office when coronavirus was at that time kind of winding down and we thought it was winding down. They were finding most people were doing work. They were sitting around socializing and catching up. There was like the sitting around the water cooler went to, you know, level 10. And they found that people weren't being less productive.

They were actually just socializing. They're like, hey, Bob, how's it going? What did you do this week? Or last year. Last year, you know. And, you know, the other aspect of it is you'll have less sexual harassment lawsuits. That's always a good thing. That is a big advantage.

We've had a really interesting. So we have team members in 43 different countries all over the world. I had one employee team member that was asking, that was talking to me about their transition from male to female. And then the very next week I was talking to a team member about him possibly getting a second wife who lived in the Middle East. Right. So like, how could those two groups of people exist in the same organization? It's because we focus on the work, not necessarily the packaging that it sits inside of. And everyone has a place to be able to work together.

And to your point, with regards to the TPS reports, it was a great interview that I did with one of the pioneers in the book. And he said, my job as a manager is to be able to protect my direct reports from distractions. And I've discovered that I am the primary source of distraction for my direct reports. So I just try to talk to them as little as humanly possible so that they can focus on actually getting work done. And I think this is really, again, that 20th century mindset of, well, I need to extract information from those team members to

be able to communicate it to the next level. When you implement radical transparency and detailed metrics inside of your company, that all happens automatically. The platform becomes the manager and you can really focus on the real issues connected to workers, which is how are you doing? You know, more of that leadership and less management is what I believe. More leadership, less management. I like that. If you lead people well, they follow you and they're inspired to do what you say. And that inspiration drives human excellence, really, when it comes down to it.

And an uninspired human being doesn't have any sort of drive towards excellence, at least not for someone else's work, maybe going and starting their own company or whatever. But before we go out, let's touch on your conference you have coming up. Yeah. So Running Remote goes by the same name. Again, the publisher really liked the term Running Remote, so we're putting it on everything. And it is a conference about building and scaling remote teams. And we've been doing it for about five years. Tell everybody I was doing it before it was cool. And it's really focused on not just building a lifestyle business. It's how do you build a remote company that's unicorn or a deca unicorn, a really big company that can significantly change the world. So we bring in

a bunch of speakers that are both operators and owners of these types of companies and show off their battle stories and how you can hopefully do the same thing. There you go. There you go. Give us your plugs one more time. So if you've been finding on the interviews, please. Sure. So runningremotebook.com, that's the best place to be able to check out the book. And if you can't afford the book or to go to the conference, go to youtube.com slash running remote. We actually have 176, someone told me last week, videos of talks that are completely free.

So we post all of our videos up for free and you can watch it on that YouTube channel. That's freaking awesome. There you go, guys. Order up the book, Running Remote, Master the Lessons of the World's Most Successful Remote Work Pioneers. It's available August 16th, 2022. So put in your pre-order book today. Thank you for joining us, Liam. We certainly appreciate it. It's been a brilliant discussion. Thanks a lot for having me.

There you go. Thanks, Simon. Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and all the different places we are on the internet. Be sure to be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.