State of American Leadership 2022
I watched the live showing of the State of the Word 2022 the other day. It was the second one I’ve seen, and once again, I came away from the event thinking it was ‘nutrient-rich’.
Matt Mullenweg packs a lot of information into that hour or so, and I end up knowing more about what’s happening with WordPress than from any of the day-to-day news I see.
WordPress will be 20 years old in 2023. It is an open-source project that is developed and maintained by volunteers (!) and currently powers over 40% of websites on the internet.
What kind of leader can inspire that level of high-quality and persistent passion–even through the dramatic paradigm shift of Gutenberg he started a few years back?
There is a fraction of society that believes “All’s fair….” in business and that ‘real’ leaders need to be crazy, bro-bullies. But I am not one of those believers. Can you imagine the likes of Musk, Trump, SBF or even Steve Jobs leading such a sustainable, inclusive and democratic, market-changing organization?
And lest you think that Matt is financially mediocre or that his vision of democratic business practices is naive, take a look at the success of his company, Automattic. I wanted to buy some Automattic stock, but it is all employee-owned, i.e., a form of shared ownership. He also runs the…
