Darren Murph was named an “oracle of remote work” by CNBC and included in the Forbes Future of Work 50. He led workplace strategy and operations at GitLab, scaling the world's first fully distributed company to IPO, and later founded Page 52 Consulting, advising organizations including Ford, Dropbox, and Zillow on distributed and AI-ready operating models. He is the author of several books on remote work, including his newest, DISTRIBUTED, and has spoken at the World Economic Forum Growth Summit and Stanford University.

To stay competitive in our industry you really need to be able to hire based on who's best for a role, not who lives nearby. 

One team, one office is probably not the best outcome in many cases.

Your regulatory lead or CMO is likely fractional, not full-time. If you started in Amsterdam or London, you'll need a US presence too, and your trials may run in China or Australia. Each adds people to the team who don't share a building, a time zone, or a first language with the rest of the company. In addition, AI now sits on top of all of that.

When people talk about the merits of co-location they often mention the serendipity of the water cooler moment and the role it plays in culture and innovation. We would argue that meeting at the water cooler isn't serendipity. Offices are designed intentionally - the coffee stations, the hallways, the lighting - none of it happened by accident.

Darren Murph argues that a multi-location, fractional, AI-enabled venture needs the same design discipline a building, but applied to how decisions and knowledge move.

GitLab scored in the top decile of McKinsey's Organizational Health Index - a diagnostic run against more than 2,500 organizations and 8 million employees - despite having no offices and colleagues who'd never met in person. Darren led workplace strategy at GitLab as it scaled to more than 2,000 employees across 65-plus countries with no central office. He wrote about that experience in his book, DISTRIBUTED, and has developed a system and frameworks for writing down decisions, workflows, and judgment calls in such a way that a new hire, a fractional contractor, or an AI tool can act on them.

DISTRIBUTED is the second pick for the LifeScience ORG Book Club, chosen because it gives you tools, mechanics and communication norms that will help you build a best-in-class team across multiple location. The set up that Darren advocates for also serves as a solid foundation for an AI-first organization.

In this session, Darren will go through what tends to break first as distributed companies scale and how that same weak point determines whether AI is useful to your company or not.

You will walk away with a clear idea of what systems are needed, and a roadmap for implementing them.

Worth reflecting on before the session:

·  How many times this year has the same question been asked by three different people - and it still isn't written down anywhere?

·  How many hours does a new hire in a different time zone from their manager lose waiting for an answer, instead of finding it themselves? 

·  If you asked an AI tool to pull together your Q4 numbers from what's currently documented, would you trust the output enough to act on it