Miguel McKelvey Quotes

As our company has grown, how we configure and design our offices has been a crucial part of how we foster connection and collaboration throughout our teams.

I believe the director's primary role is to create an atmosphere where his company can be created.

130 of Automattic's 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters. Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?

The show is called 'The Office,' and while it focuses on the people, the architecture of the space is very important.

As far as employees are concerned, clearly I like to communicate with them, since we are more than 40,000 people. I like to communicate either through e-mail or through video conferencing, which we do very often, and stream out videos and interviews. But more than that, I believe in traveling to my branches.

Distributed workforces are most likely to succeed if their culture is one that values and prioritizes face-to-face communications.

You cannot foster a collaborative environment when people's offices are completely locked, where you cannot even see the assistant because the offices are so big.

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.

Our company has to be a company that enables its people.

I understand why offices need to have office parties. I understand why offices need to have betting pools. No matter what the job, you need things to foster camaraderie and let off steam.

I need to build my team around my weaknesses.

I think that if you run a big company, you've got to, four or five times a year, just say, 'Hey team, look, here's where we're going.' If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.

The best remote companies I've seen do almost everything online, via email and telephone. But they also get together face to face on a regular basis.

The most important part of any acquisition is your ability to culturally integrate the people in the companies you acquire and your company.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work.

I'd never managed anyone before, so I don't have a lot of experience. But I'm lucky - I have a lot of team members who have a really honest relationship with me.

Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.

All companies can benefit from fostering a more flexible environment (creating a place where the most talented, industrious, and entrepreneurial people want to work) and relinquishing hierarchical control to favor a results-oriented meritocracy.

As CEO of a big company, I have to be a kind of a champion of the interests of our people as insofar as their ability to do their job, to feel comfortable in their work environment, and to be able to fulfill their ambitions.

A big part of the job of being a showrunner is, in my way of thinking, being a good communicator because there's really no other way to have hope for getting what you want, at the end of the day.

I've worked on shows where the actors don't talk to each other, and if they want to talk to each other, they talk through the director. What kind of existence is this? If I have to spend 14 hours a day with somebody, we're in a relationship. We'd better talk it out.

I've spent so many years commuting, I kind of prefer a home office.

That's what I learned most about directing on my own - you've got to build a family, a filmmaking family.

Amazon deliberately provides cafeteria space for only a third of its employees, which encourages people to venture out of the office.