What is nice about this book is it made for all of us living in 2022. It’s fresh and awake to our reality with COVID-19 and it knows it’s coming after books like ‘Remote’ and other work-anywhere books. ‘Remote’ is, dear god, more than ten years old at this time, and while it’s a great book, the more books we can get about this topic, the better, in my opinion.
Instead of reading like a manifesto that says “This is why we should play football”, this book says “We are all playing football now because football is fun, here’s our playbook”
This book is good to read after Jason Schreier’s “Press Reset” where game developers move their families across the countryside and sign their name to mortgages to work at game companies, only to have the company fold within a few months of time (sometimes a few weeks or even shorter, too). Given the strategies in “Leading from Anywhere” and the horror stories in “Press Reset,” in the near future, working in an office may look like a form of enforced insanity to many people. It’s 2022, we have incredible machines which help us communicate at lightning speed, we can manage projects and campaigns without a single piece of paper. Commuting for one to two hours each day just to talk to Fred from accounting seems like move backwards, like using horses after everyone else in the entire world has a car.
It is 2022 and yet, there are still people who use typewriters even though we have word processors. There are people who, haha, walk around the countryside and paint landscapes in oil even though cameras have been invented. And there are people who ride horses to get to work. In the most glorious future of work, going to an office will be like the typewriter, the easel, and the horse - something that is special instead of everyday.
What this book does well is it knows exactly what it is and who its audience is. Leading from Anywhere is a book that does exactly what its title says. Yet I would argue that this book is not exclusively for leaders, managers or CEOs. Anyone at any professional level would benefit from reading this book, because there are tips on ways to connect with people even without being nearby them. Give it a read if you’re a leader working from home or if you’re working from home at all.