Work Together Anywhere

Foreword

TODAY’S meeting with my Agility Scales team was a good one. In the first five minutes, we discussed the most fashionable carnival costumes for our kids. (This season, it’s LEGO ninjas, apparently.) The discussion was part of our mandatory chitchat ritual, which both forbids us from immediately diving into work mode and challenges us to be more human and personal with each other. For five minutes.

After the chitchat, we had a vigorous discussion about how to describe the nature of our online product, as well as what terminology to use to best explain it to our customers. We also talked about the priorities of new product features, the role of our user community, and several important decisions we had to make. It was a delightful conversation, one in which everyone participated equally and which felt like a strange mix of marketing and existentialism.

We finished the meeting after precisely one hour, which is how we like it. As usual, we finished with our return on time invested (ROTI) ritual. At the count of three, everyone signals how useful the meeting was by holding up between one and five fingers. Everyone rated the meeting a five—except Kirill, who offered a four. An almost-perfect rating! We joked that we’d never invite Kirill again, and he joked back that he hadn’t been invited; he had just shown up to annoy us. A big laugh followed, and then I clicked the LEAVE MEETING button.

I took off my noise-canceling headphones, put away my Android tablet, looked around ...