As the Founder and CEO of Distribute, a virtual organizational development think tank and consulting firm, I am an internationally-renowned thought leader on the topic of remote work. I like to say that I’ve been advocating for remote work since “before it was cool,” because for the past 15 years, I have been managing distributed workforces and unlocking the power of workplace flexibility to create impact in corporate and socioeconomic infrastructures.
My career started in organizational development and operations management. I loved everything about the traditional business world — the office buildings, the business suits, even the commutes. But soon, a stream of unexpected life events made my life more and more incompatible with the rigidity of a corporate career. Unwilling to give up on my professional potential, I worked fervishly to leverage emerging technology to create more location flexibility — I showed employers how I could download the supplies for my job onto a USB, take it home to work, then reupload the new files the next day; I negotiated with my college professors to study independently and only attend the classroom for critical lectures; I calculated the savings of working from home to convince my boss not to move the company into a new office; and I taught small business owners how hiring me (and others seeing flexible work options) for just a few hours a week would save them money while still increasing their output. Now, all of these models have names, like “remote work,” “e-learning,” “hybrid teams,” "virtual operations,” and “the gig economy,” and we have tools like cloud docs and video calls to make them simple, but back then, it was just a belief that professional success and productivity weren’t dependent on location.
By 2016, I had cobbled together as much of a corporate career as I could while still working flexibly and remotely — I was the COO of a fast-growing Silicon Valley startup with a 100% distributed workforce of 500 freelancers located throughout the United States. Always eager to improve, I started looking for organizational development resources for “companies without an office,” and found nothing existed except a couple of tiny blogs and webinars that were hosted by other “boundaryless” organizations trying to build on the principles of teleworking to build the new concept of “remote work.” Imagine angels singing and lights flashing, because that was the moment that I knew I had found my calling — leveraging my experience in organizational development and operations management to create a business world full of dependable, valuable jobs with flexible workplaces and schedules.
I tried knocking down the door of every consultancy and thought leader I could find (Deloitte, McKinsey, Simon Sinek, Accenture, Ken Blanchard… you name it), but the pleas of a young, rural woman with no college degree talking about an industry that didn’t exist yet fell on deaf ears. So, to create a case for viability, I decided to build a portfolio of resources and experience based exclusively on remote work. I quit my job and started working full-time as an independent contractor on any and all gigs that related to virtual organizational development —- writing articles, designing workflows for freelancers, writing digital handbooks, constructing project management systems, and planning events for virtual leaders to network.
Slowly, the topic of remote work grew throughout the world, but I noticed that most of the conversations were dangerously shallow, like working from the beach, wearing sweatpants, etc. So, as an early advocate and former COO, I tuned my voice to talk about the “unsexy side of remote work” — the behind-the-scenes components that enable companies to offer flexibility at scale, like policies, tools, training, workflows, reporting, etc. I wanted business leaders to not just see the vision of virtual operations, but to know exactly what steps to make in the change management process to make it a reality.
Now, my independent contracting experiment has grown into a small but powerful international consulting firm. As the CEO of Distribute, I’m proud to have a whole organization to help create the credible flexible work opportunities for others that I needed in my early career, but had to build for myself with nothing but grit and pride. My team of fellow experts and I collaborate with the world's leading businesses and governments on three primary topics: how to convert business operations from physical to virtual, how to build products and content for the remote work market, and how to leverage the workplace flexibility to solve global concerns. In addition to being a regular Forbes contributor, my subject matter expertise has also been showcased by brands like Zoom, VMware, Gallup, Logitech, BBC, New York Times, Office Depot, and Fast Company, and Upwork.