After No, We Won’t Have a Video Call for That, which covered how productive distributed teams operate, and the Getting out of Meeting Hell series, which focused on how you as an individual can get to being a member of a functional distributed team, let’s zoom out a bit.

Let’s discuss a slightly larger, organizational picture, just in case you ask yourself this question: “Why isn’t my organization distributed and asynchronous? And, as companies bleed talent right and left because competent people run for the competition that does get distributed work right, why don’t they wake up and become like that? Can someone please make my company more distributed and asynchronous?”

For additional context, let me interject the following observations from Kris Köhntopp, who posted them in German on Twitter (I am taking the liberty to translate here; emphasis mine):

What’s funny is that [what matters to being successful as a distributed company]
are all learnable skills — written communications, sensible meeting prep and
follow-up, correct definition of objectives and tasks, etc.

That’s a craft.

But it appears that organizations prefer to bleed their teams dry by attrition, rather
than to learn, or to hire people that can help teams to write things down,
professionally maintain a wiki, and teach and drive communications.

And further downthread, Kris says (again, my translation and emphasis):

This is all definitely feasible, after all there’s remote-first companies of substantial
size and they work.

They must have built themselves somehow, they didn’t get to where they are by
pure chance.

I agree with all of that (obviously), but things are complicated. So let’s drill into this a bit.