I’m delighted that the 2nd edition of my book “Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart” is now officially published. It’s already available on Amazon (in paperback and Kindle formats), Barnes&Noble (paperback and nook formats) and over the coming days will soon be available in physical bookstores, libraries, Apple Books and Chapter’s kobo.

I have plenty of half-read management books, so wrote this edition (like the previous one) for people who need practical answers to hard questions – and don’t have time to read a weighty management book. Each chapter is short with takeaways – most are ~8-10 pages. Each chapter is standalone, so you can jump in to solve a current need, then put it down and come back to read another chapter later. The book is written using only short words – no management speak – so it’s easy to read when tired or in a rush. The book is:

• one third practical mechanics (video etiquette, group chat, handling email, meeting etiquette, etc)
• one third human topics (hiring, firing, team culture, dealing with conflict, trust, etc) and
• one third wider social topics (diversity, urban planning, environment, disaster resilience, economic development, etc).

So, in case you already have the 1st edition, whats new in this 2nd edition? Lots! Here are some highlights:

1) Team Culture, Isolation and Burnout: Many best practices from the 1st edition still apply, but I’ve also added a bunch of new-during-covid tips for mental sanity, keeping work/life balance and avoiding burnout. Also tips for fostering team culture and holding virtual group gatherings when “inperson team offsites” are not possible.

2) Offices: Should you ever go back to an office? As people start thinking about “life after COVID-19”, this question comes up often. The last ~10 months of working from home during pandemics, economic disruption, office closures and school closures have obviously been stressful, so the appeal of “going back to the office” makes sense. It is at least in part about humans wanting social interaction with coworkers and going back to “life before COVID-19”. I outline the various pros/cons I’ve been advising company and government agency leaders on. Teaser: most are surprised by how this decision impacts their ability to hire a diverse workforce.

3) Climate: I’ve been helping the State of California with their new telework policy. Instead of the usual short-term, limited-approval-to-use telework policy, this is a long-term, widespread, telework policy. This has important consequences for workforce diversity as well as long-term disaster-planning. As part of this work, we created an automated public dashboard to measure telework rates as well as the carbon-reduction impact of this telework policy. This is the first automated dashboard (not a manual annual report) tracking telework in government that I know of, so I describe how we did it and why thats strategically important.

4) Economic Development: I helped write Vermont’s Remote Worker law (2018) which was signed into law just before the 1st edition of my book was published. This economic development initiative was an out-of-the-park success, so now other jurisdictions are starting to follow this model. I describe the important parts that make Distributed Economic Development long term successful – not just as a short-term fad during COVID-19. (This is also something I’d love to see others do, so if you are interested in doing this for your jurisdiction, email me.)

5) And of course, in context of COVID-19, I also did small nip-and-tuck edits across literally every chapter.

I hope you find this book practical and immediately useful. Please let me know what you think!

John.

My book “Distributed Teams” is now available at all Compass Books stores in San Francisco airport!

This photo still gives me goosebumps.

Even more exciting – the first in-store sale was just hours after the books were first put on display on the shelves that morning!?!?

Many thanks to Chris, Andrew and the rest of the staff at Compass Books for being willing to help me through the process as well as for being willing to carry this first-time author on their precious shelf space! If you are passing through SFO, and don’t already have a copy of my book, please do consider buying it here. You’ll be supporting good independent bookstores and the short actionable chapters will be good reading for your flight.

My “Distributed Teams” book was published six months ago, so this felt like a good time to review some metrics.

While writing my book, I had multiple people telling me that print books were dead, Amazon/kindle was the only way to go. Some literally lived on the road, with no home, so their opinion was understandable. After all, books can be heavy to carry. Maybe it was true for the specific subject matter of their books? Maybe they only used kindle, and thought others should do the same? My own reading style was different. I have a few books on my tablet, but vast majority of my books are physical books. Was I the only luddite who still skimmed over packed, curated bookshelves at home, re-reading specific helpful passages when the situation arose?

Despite all the kindle-only suggestions, I decided to create my book in multiple formats: Physical paperback, Amazon/kindle and Apple/epub. This decision delayed the release of the book, as it added significant complexity to the book creation process. But it felt like the right decision, so I did it.

Instead of writing words in the book, I found myself working on the mechanics of the book publishing process dealing with a flurry of time-consuming questions like: paperback-vs-hardback? book height and width, font size, margin size – all of which in turn change the total number of pages? How do paragraphs wrap on page boundaries? Where to put footnotes and page numbers? etc, etc, etc. I also decided that I was going to ship the book in all these formats at the same time, not one-after-another. Doing sim-ship like this is obviously harder to do, but my experience in shipping software taught me that the organizational rigor this requires has two very important side effects. 1) This avoided any perception of one format being more important or better than another. 2) This makes it easier later to track, coordinate and ship any fixes/edits to the book over the lifespan of the book. Something I’ve been thankful for with each small book update I’ve shipped since August 2018.

Six months after launch, here’s what I discovered: 72% people bought physical paperback while 28% bought kindle.

It is worth noting for the record that these numbers does not include physical copies of the book handed out in workshops I run on distributed team or as copies to people I’ve worked with. If I’d included those numbers too, it would have skewed the sales numbers even more towards paperback. I find it oddly great to watching people who don’t know me casually flipping open the book, politely skim a little and then stopping to lean in and start intently reading. Just like I enjoy watching people highlight passages and inserting post-it notes during workshops. My opinion, without evidence, is that this is less likely to happen with electronic versions.

I am now convinced that, as a writer, the right answer is to make your content available in whatever format(s) your readers use.

John

ps: While creating my book, I also created an epub version. However, I stopped part-way through the legal paperwork with apple, and then in the middle of everything else, I simply forgot to revisit. Earlier this week, a reader reminded me of this, so I’m now working on it again. The next six month report should include numbers for epub sales also. I’ve also had a few requests for audio-books, which I know nothing about but am starting to research.

On Thursday, 10jan2019, I’ll be leading a presentation and Q+A about distributed teams at Fishburners / SydneyStartupHub in Sydney, Australia. Doors open at 6pm, with formal event starting at 6.30pm and ending ~8.30pm. Click here to reserve your spot. (All proceeds from tickets go to charity.)

This presentation will build on a focus of my “Distributed Teams” book – the competitive advantages and wider economic impact of this trend to distributed teams (or “remote work” or “virtual teams” or…). Over the last ~20 years, we’ve moved from jokes about “working at home in bunny slippers” to viewing distributed teams as a competitive advantage. How did this happen? What are the cold, hard, business advantages to this trend that can help you and your organisation be more competitive and more successful? How can this trend help your organisation hire better, hire faster and improve retention? Can your organisation save money while also addressing important social, diversity, urban planning and environmental issues? How can your team or organisation work well together even when physically apart? Can you have a meaningful, well-paid career without a daily commute to a physical office?

This is usually a very interactive topic, so we’ve scheduled extra time for Q+A discussions as well as some time for networking before/after.

It is also worth noting that this will be the first presentation of 2019 in the large, newly renovated, event space at Fishburners, in SydneyStartupHub. I heard a lot about this venue earlier this year while working in Singularity University with Molly Pyle and Brian Lim, so when I arrived on holidays in Sydney and Melbourne, I had to check it out for myself.

Yes, SydneyStartupHub is a co-working space. But its like none I’ve ever seen before. This one location has ~183,000 sqft / 17,000sqm of office space across 11 floors. There’s a fantastic 110 seat theatre. There’s a large public speaking event space that can hold a few hundred people. Serious professional-grade kitchens, coffee machines and social spaces. Rock-solid internet connection. Many many many meeting rooms. Phone-booths for video-calls. Glass-walled offices and open-plan co-working desks arranged for different size startups. After a while, I just stopped counting. All renovated and stylish – yet mixed with the carefully preserved original heritage details. If you’ve never visited, you need to see it yourself to grasp the scale and great attention to detail throughout. Its mind-boggling! Oh, and the location in downtown Sydney means that it is easy to get to/from here on many different forms of public transport.

If you are now (or will be) part of a distributed team, please stop by – I hope this event will help your organization be more effective and I’d love to hear what did/didnt work for you. If you’ve never seen Fishburners or SydneyStartupHub, please use this event as an excuse to stop by and check it out. It is short notice, but I hope you can make it. 

(Note: This would not have happened without a lot of help from: Molly Pyle, Brian Lim, Fishburners, JobsForNSW, Margaret Petty @ UTS, Pandora Shelley, Georgia Marshall and Justin O’Hare. Thank you all for making this happen.)

Here’s a little trivia about the book “Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart“. This book *about* distributed teams was created *by* a distributed team.

Catherine, Linda and I live in three different states (California, New York and Utah), in three different timezones and never once met in person during the creation of this book. Instead, we “walked the talk” – following the practices from the book while writing the book.

We held video calls instead of audio-only conference calls. We used pre-agreed Single Source of Truth to track each person’s work as well as the state of the overall project. We had crisply organized communications. Depending on the phase of the project, sometimes we co-worked on multi-hour video calls multiple days in a row and sometimes we didn’t talk all week. But we always knew the latest status of what the others were working on. These, and many other tactics, came from the “How” section of the book and were essential for helping this team work well together while physically apart.

I note for the record: Catherine and I had never worked together before. Linda and I had worked together once before, years ago, on a completely unrelated project. This team went from “forming” to “performing” (bypassing the “storming” part!) while never once meeting in person. It was a great team to be a part of and one of the highlights of the whole book writing process. We’ll be working together again, I know it!

John.

Long time readers of InfoQ.com know they cover many different aspects of working in software development: the tools, the technologies, workplace cultural aspects, conferences and yes even books.

All to say, I should not have been too surprised when Ben Linders asked to interview me about my new “Distributed Teams” book. Ben has written several posts about different aspects of distributed teams and remote work over the years, so I was delighted to do this.

We covered lots of details from the book, as well as wider impact of this changing mindset in society. This was a very detailed, thought-provoking, interview and I enjoyed working with Ben on this. The article is now live here on InfoQ.com, so pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee and have a read. Hopefully you’ll like it – and if you *do* like it, please share/tweet about it.

Thank you, Ben, for making this happen.

(oh, and of course, Ben and I did the interview about distributed teams as a distributed team with ~9 hour timezone difference between us!)

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UPDATE: My book is now available on Amazon! More info here or jump straight to buy the book on Amazon by clicking on the thumbnail.

John.

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Original post follows.

My book “Distributed Teams” is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Click on the thumbnail to jump straight to the pre-order page!

That was a surreal sentence to write. And daunting to re-read while looking at the remaining ToDo list.

There is a bewildering 1,001 loose details that need to get figured out before the book officially “ships”. Buying ISBN numbers. Debate hardback vs paperback vs ebook. Page margins. Font size. Font. Resolution of images in the book. Book cover design. Create Author page on Amazon. Setup copyright – globally. Decide book pricing. Decide which countries to sell the book in. Fix bugs in the artwork. I’ve been jumping from one topic to another, learning each area as I went along. In this dizzy never-ending ToDo list, “Get book listed on Amazon” was just one more ToDo item. Several attempts failed with different error messages, sending me off debugging yet another problem, until one attempt seemed to complete without any errors?!? Huh – that’s strange. Now what? How do I know if it worked? Was there a dashboard to check status? Oh, wait. Duh. I started up a new browser, went to Amazon.com and searched for “Distributed Teams”, just like a regular user. There it was. Great. That worked. Search by my name. Yep, also there, great. Search by variations of the book title, all good. And then it hit me. Wait. There it was! My book. On Amazon!

There. Is. My. Book. On. Amazon.

Pause. Deep breath. Slowly exhale.

So here we are. At a major milestone.

It feels like I’ve reached the tipping point just like in every software release – while there are always more things being noticed that need to be fixed, the new incoming ToDos with each build are less severe and people start having more discussions about “is this serious enough to hold the release”. Quietly, morale starts improving as people change from wondering “IF it will ship” to wondering “WHEN it will ship”. After all this time headsdown and focused on research, on interviews, on writing and on editing, the nature of working on the book has changed. Instead of spending all my time on the words in the book, I’ve started spending more time on the book. Excitement about finally shipping starts mixing with anxiety about whether others will like it.

Exciting stuff.

John.
ps: For those keeping count, this latest draft is now ER#24. One great friend sent me a gift to help with the book. Nothing says “Hurry up and ship your book already!” like a delivery of ~5lbs of hand roasted, very tasty coffee beans !

Anyone who follows me here will already know I blog, speak, and mentor on the mechanics needed so humans can work well together even when they are physically apart. As I wrap up writing my book, I’ve been focusing on chapters that cover important context around distributed teams, so this post is slightly different to my usual.

Why are so many more people now talking about distributed teams? Over the last year or so, I’ve been giving a series of presentations on the business, social and environmental benefits of distributed teams. One question I hear over and over is “Why now?”. Here are the three biggest reasons I’ve seen so far:

1) Money: Software startups used to raise money for a data-center and a physical office building and staff payrolls. Only then could people start working on The Next Big Thing. Regardless of what your product will be, creating your data-center takes time to setup and has risks – a data-center that is incorrectly sized for future anticipated traffic or with operational problems could kill your company. You could also kill your company by choosing to setup a physical office in the wrong location (limiting hiring) or choosing an office that is too small (disrupting hiring until you relocated or setup a second office location) or too big (needlessly increasing your burn rate even when your cash flow is tight). Since Amazon Web Services became mainstream, it eliminated the lead time for building a data-center. You still pay money for AWS, but it instantly scales up/down as your customer demand grows/shrinks – and some clever engineering can significantly reduce your AWS bills.

Now that the cost & lead time for a data-center is off the list for most companies, the cost & lead time for a physical office is a expensive outlier that people are starting to question as they look for funding.

2) Social/Economic change: The idea of “a job for life” is no more. People expect to change jobs throughout their career. When people working at high-profile organizations like Google, Facebook, Uber, etc leave after an average of 1.2-1.8 years, that means a person entering the workforce can expect to change companies ~20 times in their ~40 year career. Moving house for your first few jobs might be fun, but after a while most people want to set down roots with a partner, buy a home, grow a community of friends, start raising a family and taking care of parents. Over time, moving becomes harder.

3) Environmental awareness: Requiring everyone to live within commute distance of an office means a lot of commuters. No surprise there. What is less obvious is the ripple effect. As more high-paid people pay more for housing to reduce their commute, it forces displacement of everyone else, so the people who are needed to make a city function are forced to live further and further away. In practical terms that means cops, medics, firefighters, teachers, artists and others all commute longer hours each way to their lower-paid jobs. The term “mega-commuter” is now used to describe anyone who commutes >2.5 hours. Each way. Each day. No wonder traffic in the San Francisco bay area has spiked up 70% since 2010, even though the population “only” increased by 10% in that same time frame. All this traffic has a measurable toll on quality of life, for sure. However, it is also explicitly worth noting that of all the CO2 emissions from the US, the 2nd largest portion of emissions (27%) is from cars, buses and other transportation. Reducing the need for people to commute is an important way for us all to reduce our carbon footprint. Put another way: instead of reducing pollution by promising to buy the latest electric car when it becomes affordable, you could instead start reducing pollution today commuting less often and start working from home. Today.

Each of these are important reasons in their own right. And that’s not even taking into account all the other good business reasons for distributed teams (hiring, retention, diversity, etc). No wonder starting fully distributed companies is becoming mainstream. Hopefully, this book will help them start with the practical mechanics needed to succeed. As more distributed companies succeed, they each help improve the narrative for others who follow.

(This is an extract from my upcoming book “Leading Distributed Teams”. For more on this, see oduinn.com/book.)

John.