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Harvard Business Review
23-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
When Over-Collaboration Leads to Indecision
HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership , case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Collaboration is a good thing—until it gets in the way of action. Too much collaboration can stall decision-making and hold you back. In this HBR IdeaCast episode from 2018, host Sarah Green Carmichael speaks with leadership coach Rebecca Shambaugh about how to curb over-collaboration in yourself and on your team. They discuss how perfectionism, workplace culture, and even well-intended leadership messages can lead employees to over-consult and under-decide. Their conversation starts with how to spot the behavior. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What does the classic over-collaborator's life look like, and feel like? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: (laughs) Well, I was probably on one of those spectrums, you know, and I think one of the things that you – as a manager, if I have a direct report or a team member who's over-collaborative, they tend to not have a lot of self-confidence within themselves. So that's why they continue to reach out and get other people's inputs. They want to please everyone, right? And it's impossible these days to please everyone. They may not be able to prioritize very much. So, there may be key areas where you have to prioritize or collaborate and get key influencers – your managers, if you will – input or ideas and perspective. But there are other things that, you know what? You should just really make that decision, or you should really delegate that. So they're doing a lot of activities that aren't really producing a lot of progress – i.e., getting to a decision. And they come to you and they say: 'I just don't have time for the high value projects, because they're eating their time and continuing for months and weeks to collaborate with people and not really come to agreements, or decisions.' SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One question I have about that is how much can we emphasize the individual's responsibility for that situation, versus the company culture or the managers' mixed messages? In some cases, it's easy to see that, you know, people might not have a bias for action because they'd been kind of told to wait for permission to act. How can you diagnose whether it's you or your company that's causing the problem? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, it could be a combination of both or sometimes it's just the direct relationship with your manager, more than anything. I always say, you know, look in. And I invite people to first examine their own belief system, their own narrative, that's causing them to show up and seek out everyone else's opinion or you know, doing things that are more task-related. Or, perhaps you tend to be more in the perfectionism zone, where everything has to be 100 percent right before it goes out the door. Hence you over-collaborate, right? You try to get to consensus with everybody because you tend to be a pleaser. I think also when we coach individuals, we sort of put in front of them an activity-based tool where they look at their whole day or their whole week, and [we] invite them to do a personal audit. And say: 'Okay, what are the priority areas that you know, you really feel like you are responsible for – your key objectives?' And when I'm personally coaching women in particular – and sometimes men – they'll give me 10 or 15 key priorities. And that's the first thing – you can only have three to five, and do three to five very well. So you've got to somehow re-prioritize or delegate or take something off of that to-do list. You could be spending 60 percent of your time in low-priority areas. So, [the] first thing is to do that critical self-assessment of ourselves. The other thing is, what good managers do, they help you to provide context. So sitting down or meeting with your manager and saying: 'Look, here are all the activities I'm doing. Help me to really prioritize what you see as the top areas.' And the first response managers will give you, after they see your personal audit, they'll say, 'I had no idea you were doing all this, and I didn't know you were making all of these phone calls to get an agreement on something that probably one or two people could really help you to make that decision.' SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So often, the advice that we tell ourselves or that we give to other people is about learning to say 'No.' So while aas a manager we might say, 'This person really just needs to learn to say no.' You might even tell that person this is what you need to do. We often blame ourselves if we're feeling overstretched, like 'God, I should just be better at saying no.' Is that realistic? I mean is just declining to take on more work a realistic solution? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah, I mean the whole piece around is it important to say no and, how do I do that, I guess is perhaps more of the question there too… I think before you say no, I think you need to understand the bigger picture and the rationale of their thinking and why they want to give you this project. For example, sponsorship. Notably, women have a lot of mentors, but they're under sponsored. And the sponsors are the ones that give you the lift; they give you the visibility; they give you those projects that aren't in your sight that could really give you greater opportunities to be more engaged in the business and so on and so forth. So if a woman is totally stretched on a rack and doing her best job, but she says, 'How can I just take on one more project?' I invite women to really step back and put on the pause button and say, 'Help me to better understand what's your vision for this project? How do you see this mapping out to my growth goals – areas that I can really benefit from, from a career growth perspective, from a visibility perspective and just from a pure advancement and promotion perspective?' And they may know something that you don't know. And then to me it's all about negotiations: 'Okay, well if I am going to be doing this extra project – which sounds something like I've always wanted to do but didn't really have the access to it – something else has to give. And so I'd like to propose that I re-source a couple of these other activities out, so I can be putting all my best discretionary effort into this project.' And so build the business case around that – be solution based. Sometimes you don't have to say no, but also looking at other alternatives to really redesign your day-to-day activities [and] responsibilities so that you can do this. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL:And why do you tend to focus on women when you're talking about this topic? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: I think women tend to, by virtue of their socialization early on – and I don't want to generalize and put women just in a box, and this doesn't mean that men aren't in this position as well. But women tend to want to please their, they tend to be more facilitative in nature, hence more collaborative. They tend to like a little bit more harmony, you know – less competitive. And so, sometimes we default to some of these styles that disempower us. It doesn't mean that women don't have it within them to be more strategic in terms of how they're spending their time. But I think they need to, number one, give themselves permission to do that. And they need sometimes the feedback and the coaching and the tools and the skills to shift – number one, their narrative and their belief system about themselves. And be able to believe that they, that they can do this role, that they can speak up, they can make an ask, versus the concern they're gonna rock the boat. So in the first book I wrote, 'The Sticky Floors,' a lot of times women – their own beliefs – will sabotage their best interest, right? And self-limit their ability to grow and advance and to really evolve beyond. So we have a tendency to disempower ourselves and you know, be more critical on ourselves than sometimes men do. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It's interesting because I recently read some research that we published in that suggests that in single sex groups, women will share sort of unglamorous tasks equally. Whereas groups of men, it tends to be like the same two guys doing those tasks over and over again. And so I wonder if that's a case where womens' collaborativeness helps – like if you happened to work in a group of all women, you're kind of rotating those chores. Whereas you know, men, it seems like that the two same guys are kind of out of luck over and over again. So even though I agree with you that there's a lot of research on over collaboration and women, I do think there are guys out there who really struggle with this too, and I think the evidence bears that out. REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, there's no question about that. And again, you know, we need balanced leadership and I think a strength of women we need to embrace and tap into more is the spirit of collaboration, and how do you do that? Collaboration is all about building trust, and trust is down in most companies. So it's important to be able to connect the dots and be cross-supportive to achieve a unified goal together. I think men tend to just go and do it, right? They just go and do it. They tend to be more transactional, to some degree. So I think it's important to have both. But this is an area where we coach men on quite a bit, is to be inclusive, is to be more collaborative and to open up your aperture to a variety of different relationships beyond just you, to go to, to ask their perspective or view on a problem or issue or just their advice is to broaden and diversify your network so it is diverse, and you're not always going to the same people who look and think like you. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you're managing someone who is genuinely roo collaborative, male or female, one of the pieces of advice you've given to managers is to help them get over this by giving feedback that's goal-oriented. Can you give me an example of kind of what non-goal-oriented feedback would sound like but then fix it so that it's goal-oriented and proper feedback? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: I think if you're a manager, this is not always an easy conversation, but I always start off in coaching men or women to say, 'Tell me about how you're spending your time, what do you see as the key priorities?' And really have them map that out for you – what their assumptions are around that. Because all they know is what they know and they could be operating in a vacuum that they don't know some of the top priorities. Or perhaps they may not understand that, you know, honestly, we don't need to get to consensus on this. You really need to step back, and let me give you a better sense from a feedback perspective of the organizational dynamics. And in this case, on this particular project, you know, while you share with me [that] you reached out and got consensus with 10 people. The key people that will be advocating and sponsoring this, and moving this through for us, and who politically we need to really connect the dots with and help them to be aware and get their input are these three people. And helping them to understand why it's those three people as opposed to those 10 or 12. Sometimes our team members just don't have that bigger-picture thinking or understand the organizational dynamics [or] what are some of the changes happening around the corner. So I think that that's really important. And helping them to go through self-discovery, versus telling them 'You're spending too much time here. You need to get over and be more collaborative or be more directive.' We hear this all the time, but women, or people, just don't know what to do with that. You might be efficient, you're checking off all the boxes, but at the end of the day, It's holding you back from really tapping into the right relationships to really get the project moving versus stalling. And then helping them to see that – you know, gosh, you feel like you need to get agreement from everyone. Well, you know what? Empowering them and letting them know that you are the one who knows more than anybody else on this project. I remember I got this feedback many, many years ago when I was still working in corporate America and I was a perfectionist. I felt like I needed to get everyone to agreement. And then my manager came by and gave me this helpful piece of feedback. He said, 'You know, I appreciate all the hard work you've done here, but the end of the day I hired you because you know more than anybody else around this particular project and area of expertise. And I'm really relying upon you at the end of the day to make this decision.' So empowering them and giving them the confidence to know that not only do they have the authority to do that, but you believe in their strengths and their experience and background to make those decisions. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: A common employee response to being told to spend time on higher value activities is to say, 'I don't have time to do those higher value activities because I've got too many of these low value tasks on my plate.' So if they've done the time audit, and they're spending most of their time on stuff that's really not a priority, they might come back and say 'That's the organization's fault or that's my manager's fault and this is just what I have to do. And this is the amount of time it takes.' How can you as a manager help them see that they do have control over this? How do you help them problem solve, so that they can free up time to do the stuff that really will get them promoted? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah. A lot of times, again, it gets back to our own belief system: We need to do all these things. And they in sometimes they need to be done way that I think they need to be done because no one can do them better, right? Or I, I love all these projects and because I get a lot of fulfillment, satisfaction out of it, but you know what? It's getting me nowhere. So it's an incumbent upon a manager to help them to move further into the traditional Covey quadrant, the third quadrant there on the top right – to be more thoughtful, mindful about your time and how it's being spent. So I think it's really - and this is generally, not just necessarily women but men too is – is to really go over…you know, it's rare that a manager will sit down these days and say, 'Where would you like to grow? What's your future career lifeline look like?' And really together examine what they're doing and how those activities are growing new skillsets, are expanding their relationships, giving them more visible projects versus the mundane projects that really aren't seeding their growth and their confidence. Right? So it's really helping them to recalibrate those activities, and then really creating a plan of action to make that happen. And I think that it's incumbent upon that just waiting for the manager to come in and observe that, but it's important for us to come and say, 'Look, you know, here are some ideas. Here are some things that I need to really talk to you about,' before things do go off the tracks, or you realize that you just can't do this job anymore. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The research does show that women are often expected to be more collaborative. We get asked to volunteer for more projects, especially having the low value ones. We're often expected to lead through consensus, and we do. So I'm wondering for male managers of women – because we have a lot of men who listen to the IdeaCast – what do you wish that they knew about this? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, I think this gets back to understanding the diverse spectrum of styles amongst your team and really opening up your lens to see where those different styles can bring value to the things that you're doing. That's really important. And, and I think sometimes, look, we all have bias, right? Which can turn into stereotypes about how we view a certain person. If I'm more collaborative, inclusive, you know, and the other person is more directive, right to the point, likes to make a decision and move on. You know, that's okay. But understand that people have different styles in terms of how they make decisions. So I think it's important to have a diverse spectrum on your team, of different ways of thinking about something, processing something; different communication styles. If not, you get the groupthink, you get the same people thinking the same way and communicating the same way. And that's just not going to work in today's environment. I don't think it's a negative necessarily for men to come up and say, 'Why does she talk that way so much? Why she overly collaborative? She could have made that decision?' It's just our lens and our norm of what we have been used to. So it's inviting men to – this is the same thing about diversity and inclusion, right? Companies have a lot of diversity, but we're not tapping into and leveraging the best styles, the best strengths and experiences of everyone. If we did, we would probably in most cases have better outcomes; greater levels of problem solving and decision making. So I encourage them to be open to those different styles and look at ways where you can utilize those styles for the benefit of everyone. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Because I could see if you were trying to get better at saying 'no' to tasks that don't add value, or acting more decisively while still being somewhat inclusive. I could really see it coming off kind of the wrong way – you know, 'No, I won't do that. And here's the decision I'm making!' And you know, it does seem that it's the kind of thing that does take a little bit of practice before it feels natural and before it comes across as natural to other people. REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah. And I just want to say say layered in that is, what's really important in that is having the emotional and social intelligence, right? There's a time and a place to say 'no.' There could be layoffs and reorganization. Your manager comes up and says, 'Look, this is a tough time for the next six to eight months. I need you to jump in and help out with this.' Right? You want to be a team player, you want to be understanding the needs and concerns of others and their schedules and their priorities. So I think when you are saying 'yes' or saying 'no,' it's just not a straight yes or straight no, it's really taking into consideration your colleagues, right? The bigger picture. And your rationale for the yes or no should really think and link to the needs in the context of others, that decision isn't just more of a self-serving, self-oriented decision. I think when people on the other end know that you've taken their best interest in mind and it still may be a 'no,' right, that you've thought through this – maybe not this, but I could do this in the context of what you're trying to do. That would be something I can best align with and support you. That's being inclusive in your decision-making in your ask, and how you say yes and how you say no. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Becky, you have mentioned that you earlier in your career struggled with some of these issues and I'm wondering for you, what really made the difference? How did you change your own mindset around some of this so that you can be free of this problem? REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, you do have to look inside, and sometimes what got you here is not going to get you there. I think I was a perfectionist. I mean, I would rework PowerPoint decks. I would over-collaborate, you know, because I doubted my own worth and knowledge. I did a lot of the same things I coach people on. I went out and I talked about expectations and what's good enough and you know, how I needed to really better align my activities with the things that perhaps were more higher value. But I realized that all this is giving yourself permission, right? If I'm an over-collaborator, a perfectionist, one of the things that I realized in my journey of getting feedback and talking to other people around some of these similar challenges they have, but how did you navigate through this, right? How did you come out of this as a great leader? And a lot of it is just knowing and believing in yourself. And as a perfectionist, I said, 'You know, 88 percent of the people I spoke to are not perfectionist. Why am I being more difficult on myself? Why don't I just join the world of imperfection, and realize that everything doesn't have to be perfect?' So I think a lot of this starts within, in our own belief system and narrative and understanding how that can self-limiting for us, to a certain degree. Right? And I was lucky to have a manager who helped to empower me to believe in myself. And then after several experiences, after speaking up, after being more decisive, people sort of, the room shifted. People began to see me as a leader, right? Partly because I started to believe in myself and I started to get that confidence. And I was intentional then, eventually, about that. So it's not an overnight process, but I think those are just some of the things that I give advice and guidance to when making those shifts, you know, early on, or during these situations where you feel stuck. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Becky, thank you. This has been really helpful and I appreciate your time. REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: You're welcome. Sarah. Always enjoy it. HANNAH BATES: That was leadership coach Rebecca Shambaugh in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at This episode was produced Mary Dooe and me, Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Amanda Kersey, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
Harvard Business Review
23-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
How to Turn Your Customer Base into a Community
HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy —case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. 'Community' is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the business world. But what does it really mean to build one—and what does it take to make it last? More importantly, how can businesses create communities that drive long-term success? Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic—the company behind WordPress—joins HBR IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael to answer those questions. He shares insights on fostering community within a firm—like hiring the right people through auditions instead of resumes—and within a customer base, by encouraging engagement and feedback. Here's Mullenweg explaining why what's good for his customers and contributors is good for his company. MATT MULLENWEG: For me, it all starts with community. That's really the beginning– the alpha and the omega. Everything that has been successful for WordPress in the past– and everything for Automattic– has really been part of thinking about what's the best long-term answer for the wider– I don't want to say community 10 times– but for the wider audience, people that are part of the ecosystem that makes up WordPress users and developers and the creators and all those sorts of folks. I do truly believe that working in their best interest is in the best commercial interest of the company long term. Maybe in the short term you make less money, and that might frustrate some of our investors or something. But in the long term, I think you're much healthier and better off. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's interesting. So there's obviously the community of people who use WordPress, which has grown really, really fast and is huge. And then there's the core community of people, I think, within WordPress– what you might call employees– which has maybe grown a little bit more. I saw an interview with you last year where you were saying you were taking the brakes off and hiring more people. MATT MULLENWEG: I'm trying to grow the user base as fast as possible. And I'm trying to grow the employee base as fast as possible, but while still maintaining our culture. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So how do you do that? MATT MULLENWEG: I think it's just a rate. If you look around the room, how many people have been there more than a year, and how many people have been there less than a year? It's also, what example are the people who have been there longer setting? Because essentially what you're saying– especially if someone's been there five or 10 years– this person is good. They haven't been fired. So they are demonstrating what it means to be a part of this organization. So if you're at a company dinner and they go and they order the most expensive thing on the menu and an expensive bottle of wine and then they expense it, that's going to tell you something about the values of the company and what's the behavior that's OK. So I don't think culture has anything to do with ping-pong tables or any of that stuff, especially since we don't have them here. Those people are not in our office. It's really the culmination of 1,000 little decisions and actions that people see and then they emulate. And that starts from the very, very top. If you're the CEO or a founder and you walk by a piece of trash on the floor and you don't pick it up, you know what, everyone else is going to too. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and I'm glad that you mentioned your– what we at HBR would maybe a bit formally call a distributed workforce. You are famous at Automattic for having people scattered all over the world and not for putting a premium on– oh, we all have to be in the same city working together. Tell me a little bit about how that informs your decisions around building the company culture and that kind of thing. I mean, your example [INAUDIBLE] walking through the office, maybe picking up a piece of trash– what's the digital, distributed, virtual world equivalent of that? MATT MULLENWEG: It's funny because our designers actually do something– they call it trash pick-up day. They literally go around all of our products and look for things that are just out of alignment or where the colors aren't right or the typography isn't well. And they just do little fixes. Generally it takes less than half an hour or 20 minutes. But, yeah, they call it trash pick-up. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's interesting. So just to sort of finish this interesting company culture jag that we've been on– I know one of the things that you have talked about is hiring by auditions rather than resumes. And I'm just wondering, is that something you've been able to keep doing as you've hired more people? And if so, do you use that to not only see how their work product turns out, but also to see how will this person contribute to the culture that we've built? MATT MULLENWEG: Absolutely. In fact, I still to this day refer people to the HBR article. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yay! MATT MULLENWEG: It's actually still totally accurate. The only thing that's changed is the numbers. We're now 390 people. In the article I feel like we were sub 200. So it's working. It's scaling. And in fact, the more trials we do, the more times we run the process, I feel like the more people learn about it and the better they get. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's great. That's wonderful to hear. I wanted to pivot now back to talking about the kind of user community of the people who are actually using your products. One of the things, I think, that some of the big companies who read HBR have struggled with is creating communities around their products. I mean, this is something that people say– oh, we have to build a community around our products– but then when it comes time to do it, it seems there's hesitation that I think sometimes seems to come from a desire just to control everything. MATT MULLENWEG: Totally. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So tell me about that. Is that something that you have wrestled with– how much control do we give away– or do you just have to trust people? Is it something that internet-native companies can do that established brands just can't? I would love your thoughts on that. MATT MULLENWEG: I feel like the equivalent of what companies sometimes do is they invite a bunch of people to their house for a party and they don't put out any appetizers or drinks or anything. And they're like, why aren't people having fun? Why aren't they having fun? Go have fun. You know, you've got to grease the wheels a little bit. If you were hosting a dinner or a party, you would put out the snacks and the hors d'oeuvres. And you would make sure the liquor's flowing freely and the wine and everything. You're giving something to people, and then they start to participate. And whatever it is, the constructive is of what you're trying to create. With WordPress, I mean, we give away extremely good software. It's multimillion dollar software that you can download for free. And so just from the start of it, people feel like they've gotten a lot of value. And for us, in particular– they get so much, again, for free, no expectations of anything– is a lot of people turn around and say, well, what can I do in return? What can I give back? Just like after a good dinner party, you might have a few of your guests helping out with the dishes. Because they're so appreciative of how good the food is, what a great host you were. So as with all things, it works best when there's no expectations. If on your dinner party invite you said, you may come to dinner, but you have to stay for 34 minutes afterwards and clean up, that doesn't sound like a very fun party, does it? SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: No. And it's an interesting analogy because I think it's– the other attitude I would say to continue that metaphor would be there's a feeling of maybe some people are worried that they'll have this party and then if people have too good of a time, the partygoers will get drunk and trash their house. And so it's like, OK, everyone, time to go home because, really, you've had enough. MATT MULLENWEG: Well, again, it's the example you set. The parties I've been to that got a little out of hand, it was usually because the person who was hosting the party was also getting out of hand. [LAUGHING] SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Fair enough. One other thing you've just sort of hinted at there that I wanted to ask you about was the freemium model, because that's obviously a model that relies on getting a significant number of people to use the product and then a smaller percentage to actually pay for it. This is something that I think a lot of different companies, legacy companies have looked at as maybe a way to make money in the internet era. Do you think that something like that would work for more companies? Do you think it's just something that works for your company? It's sort of a vague question, but I would love your thoughts on that as well. MATT MULLENWEG: It just depends on the product. WordPress is relatively inexpensive to run for people. And so it doesn't cost us a ton to have people use it for free. And so it's a smart business decision– essentially use free as a mechanism to get more people in the door and then a percentage of them convert. And the economics of that work out. We have another product called VaultPress. So VaultPress is a real-time backup system. So for the sites that you really care about, you can pay VaultPress $5 or $15 a month. And the instant that you make a change on your site, it's backed up to nine different places. So it's literally ultra ultra good backup. This is a premium-only product. There's no free version. And that's because, well, it's really expensive to run, because we're storing nine or 11 copies of all your changes in real-time as soon as you make them. So that's an example. I think it just depends on the economics of the product as well. Apple doesn't give away free phones, but they work with phone companies to make the economics more affordable for people in the US. So they could subsidize phones. So you just have to look at your particular business model. The internet does make premium very, very attractive. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. I mean, and I guess the thing is the premium product then has to be worth the upgrade, because if it's just marginally better, then no one would pay for it. for it. They'd just keep using the free product, I suppose. MATT MULLENWEG: And that is the hardest part is deciding what to put in the free version and what to put behind the paid version, because the more stuff you put in the free, the more value it is, the more growth you have. But if you don't have anything that's super compelling behind the paywall, if you will, no one's going to bother upgrading. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and I guess so many internet companies now rely on advertising to support their business models. And I guess that's the other question I have is, how much of this can we keep supporting off of ads? MATT MULLENWEG: You know, advertising is definitely going through a rough spot right now. A lot of the oxygen in the room is being eaten up by the Googles and Facebooks of the world. So I wouldn't bet my business on advertising. I think if you can have a hybrid model where in good times advertising can support you and in other times you're providing enough value to your core audience– that they're paying you directly– I think that can be very sustainable. But it is possible that when you think of advertising is fundamentally trying to get us to make an action, usually a commercial one. They'll be able to close the loop on this a lot better. So advertising dollars will get smarter and smarter, where right now they just have a lot of work to do. They're a little bit lazy. They'll go to the big guys and folks who are holding people's attention. Let's say it's a great 8,000-word HBR article that takes 30 minutes to read, and 10,000 people read it. You have 300,000 minutes of attention there. You should be able to monetize that from an advertising point of view just as well as a Google or Facebook. An ineffecient market. One thing about the future as well is that you can imagine almost every device in your life becoming better when it's connected to the internet. We're seeing early versions of this with things like the Nest thermostat– you know, the ability to change the thermostat that's upstairs when you're downstairs or things like that, or turn it on when you leave or if you go on vacation. But also things like– I actually just got– just like an hour ago– something called an Electric Objects frame. And basically what it is is it's a screen, but it has no buttons, no controls, no notifications, no anything. All it does is a Mac screen that connects to the internet and displays art. And it looks beautiful– like a picture frame. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's cool. MATT MULLENWEG: And so now I have this device in my– that looks just like the art it's sitting next to. And from my phone I can change what's on there at any given point. And I think things like this will have entirely new mediums spring up around them, that we have a lot more control of our environment and our environments become a lot more complimentary to us, just like how your home can transform when you put a Sonos speaker in every room and you can synchronize them. That sort of tailoring of our environment [INAUDIBLE] mediated by the net. It's going to be very exciting. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and as someone who spends too much time staring at a screen, I sort of am excited about the idea of spending less time with screens. And I think connected objects are a way to get there. MATT MULLENWEG: It's ambient technology, right? So it's a technology that fades into the background even though it's always there. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Mm-hm. OK So in the past I have seen some interviews with you where you've talked about different personal productivity experiments you've run– changing your sleep schedule or limiting how often you check email. And I was wondering if you have any current ongoing personal productivity experiments that are currently underway– things you're trying to do differently just to be happier or get more done. MATT MULLENWEG: Yeah. Something I'm focused on right now is tiny habits. That's probably the easiest way to put it. Things like, I do two sun salutations when I wake up in the morning, which is very easy, right? But by making sure I'm going to do two no matter how early or late I am or how rushed I am, I often end up doing a lot more. And these daily stretches are a great way to start the day. I do that with some exercises. I try to read a chapter of a book every day– very minimum. One thing I've been more conscious of is productivity, we think of in terms of what you're outputting. But I think it's also really important to think of your state of mind that's creating this. A lot of this, if you break it all down to the million different things you can do. Breathing– a lot of it comes back to breathing. And a good exercise that anyone listening to this or you yourself could do right now is just to stand there and take a few deep breaths, but take them from your belly instead of from your chest. So your chest should stay completely still. As you breathe in, expand your belly. And as you breathe out, feel it contract. And this just puts your body into a more relaxed state. And I find that if I can detect when I'm having a conversation or chatting or writing a blog post or something like that, I'm in more of the fight or flight mode. My brain's probably more reactive and proactive. If you can just take a few deep breaths, it puts you into a great state to be able to really think through things and think through all sides of things and dispassionately examine both your feelings and what you're outputting in a way that often has much superior results. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That's cool. As you were talking about that, I just tried to do it. And I do feel immediately more calm. So thank you for that. MATT MULLENWEG: Instantly, right? SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. MATT MULLENWEG: It's the craziest thing because we all breathe all day. But you think about it for a few seconds, and it changes everything. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Matt, thank you again so much for talking with us today. It's really been a pleasure. MATT MULLENWEG: Likewise. HANNAH BATES: That was Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on HBR IdeaCast . We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, and me Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
