Book Review: The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun

The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work

Non-Fiction Self-Help/Business Development Kindle Book

Amazon Rating: 4.4 Stars (179 reviews as of this posting)

The Year Without Pants catalogues the journey of author, Scott Berkun, as a team lead at WordPress for over a year. It’s the type of book perfect for those who like to read about how other companies function in order to implement tactics that work well within their own business. As I read, I took note of several things that would be worth remembering as I continue to build my own author empire (still working on this). 

Let’s dive into the good the bad and the great!

The Good

I liked what many other reviewers didn’t, the mass of detail surrounding his time with WordPress. Scott takes a normal day of work and expands on it at several points throughout the book. The process under the hood at WordPress fascinated me, probably because it’s been my blogging tool of choice from the beginning. If the book was written about a company that repaired cars, I would have stopped reading early on. To each his/her own. 

The Bad

The book is riddled with proofing errors that distract from the reading. If the book is missing an obvious word here or there no big deal, (our brains usually miss these anyway) but when the error causes confusion as to what the author is saying (often), it makes for a confusing reading experience. For a professional book of this caliber I would have expected much better. And to note, although I consider myself a writer, I am not a proofreader. This blog post might have proofing errors, and I think that’s okay. But for a book people pay to read you do expect more.

The Great

Scott gives a plethora of examples companies could use to improve their culture, and makes a strong point as to the idea that company culture influences everything else around it. Repair or strengthen the company culture and then (and only then) attempt to develop further. It’s obvious that WordPress was/is a great company to work for and it appears to be largely due to it’s culture. The idea of infinite time off sounds insane to some, but when you build a team of people what WANT to do the work, this vacation protocol not only works, it ADDS to the already existing positive work culture. 

Pick up the book on Amazon here and become learn what it’s like to work remotely, pants optional. 

Enjoy and best of luck in all of your entrepreneurial endeavors. 

-Jordan