I was watching this TEDx video: Margaret Heffernan “Dare to Disagree” and it really made me think.

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree

One of the reasons I suspect I was laid off from About.com was because I had the temerity to disagree with staff. I would point out bugs and flaws in their code or design. I had discussions with both editors and senior executives about how the site could be improved and what I thought was going wrong and right.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the 80s—big hair, power ballads, CDs, Miami Vice, break dancing, lingerie as outer wear (okay, maybe not that last one). But one thing that I don’t miss is the idea that the only place you can do work in a corporate environment is in an office. Saying that you “work from home” was equivalent to saying you were unemployed and preferred to sit around at home watching soaps, eating bon-bons, and generally slacking. This attitude persisted into the 90s, perpetuated by people like my dad (love ya Dad!) who believed that it was impossible to “work” from home. (Quote marks his.) But in the companies I worked for in the 90s, only one didn’t allow work at home, and that was because of the job, not just categorically. And at my last job in the 90s and 2000s, I not only worked from home 100% of the time, but I also managed a team of between 7 and 10 people, all of whom worked from home at least every once in a while. Rather than sacrificing “speed and quality” as Yahoo! CEO Marisa Mayer  implies happens (read the memo at All Things D) when employees work from home, my team was extremely effective, had regular meetings where we had strong communication and collaboration. In fact, my team worked with people in Europe, India, China, Japan, Brazil, and North America on both coasts, and it was possible because we could wake up at 2am, stumble to the phone, and be on a call in our pajamas. If I were expected to come into the office to be on that call, I wouldn’t be on the call, and neither would any of my team (except someone who worked out of the office where that was business hours).