7 Ideas - Phil Libin

The Evernote co-founder is busy reimagining how tech teams should work and he thinks you should be too.

- By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

IT'S BEEN YEARS since Phil Libin helmed the organization-apps maker Evernote, but he just can't resist trying to reshape the exhaustively inefficient business world. This founder is now running two remote companies with a total of 130 employees, and he spends a lot of time rethinking the post-industrial economy for knowledge workers. How do we measure asynchronous productivity? Can we eliminate the oppression of the persistent "on" of the internet? Can meetings be fewer and better? Why can't our baseline be trust? At 51, the serial entrepreneur has learned to trust-and he has learned plenty more.

1 BREAK THE TYRANNY OF LINEAR TIME

There's a false assumption that work happens when people talk at one another in real time, in meetings or on Zoom calls. But how many of them are to check up on people, and not to accomplish something? There's a certain tyranny to that. I don't expect quick responses. I expect correct responses, or high-quality responses. Now that we are not restrained by geography or time zones or cognitive style, a company loses out on all the advantages of those things if it maintains a synchronous culture.