How, not where: Mike Cannon-Brookes and the case for distributed work

By 2023, the great office war had settled into a familiar shape. Chief executives sent memos; staff grumbled and complied; consultants warned that culture would dissolve without the watercooler. Almost everyone argued from instinct. Mike Cannon-Brookes argued from a spreadsheet.

His company, the Sydney-founded software firm Atlassian, had gone fully distributed in 2020 under a policy it called Team Anywhere. Rather than quietly reverse course as the return-to-office tide rose, Atlassian let the experiment run, instrumented it, and then published what it found. The report, "Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian", reads less like a manifesto than a lab notebook. And its central claim is deceptively simple: distributed work describes how work gets done, not where.

A thousand days, counted

The numbers Atlassian put forward were the point. By the company's account, 92% of its employees said the distributed policy enabled them to do their best work, and 91% named it a key reason they stayed. Tellingly, with no mandate to do so, more than 80% still visited an office at least once a quarter, and intentional team gatherings produced a measurable lift in how connected people felt, an effect that lasted months rather than days.

That last finding is the one most easily lost in the shouting. Team Anywhere does not declare the office dead, and it does not sentence everyone to a solitary spare room. The claim is narrower: presence should be deliberate. You gather people on purpose, for the things gathering is actually good at, and you let the rest of the work happen asynchronously and in the open. Remote here isn't a concession wrung from a reluctant employer. It's a discipline, write things down, default to sharing, stop mistaking attendance for contribution.

Cannon-Brookes has been careful, and consistent, about where the choice sits. He has no time for blanket rules in either direction. "I would think that any government mandating work from home seems like an odd thing," he told an Australian interviewer. "Any government mandating working from an office would equally be odd." His view is that businesses should choose for themselves; he simply intends Atlassian to choose differently, and to keep the receipts. He has even allowed himself a competitive smirk about rivals dragging staff back: in a purely selfish sense, he has said, return-to-office mandates are good for Atlassian, they would like everyone else to do them.

Open by default

None of this came from nowhere. Distributed-by-design is a natural extension of a value Atlassian has carried since long before the pandemic: "Open company, no bullshit." The company's own description of it is plain, "Openness is root level for us. Information is open internally by default and sharing is a first principle", paired with the reminder that candour requires "equal parts brains, thoughtfulness, and caring."

A culture that already treats information as open-by-default has less to fear when people stop sharing a room. If the decision gets written down where everyone can read it, the corridor conversation was never load-bearing to begin with. Async-first work and radical internal transparency turn out to be the same instinct: a refusal to let proximity stand in for clarity.

From a credit card to the Nasdaq

The instinct to measure rather than assume traces back to the beginning. Cannon-Brookes co-founded Atlassian in 2002 with Scott Farquhar, a friend from the University of New South Wales, where Cannon-Brookes had read information systems on a co-op scholarship. The founding capital, by the now-famous telling, was a credit card; the goal, modestly, was to earn the equivalent of a graduate salary without having to wear a suit to someone else's office.

What they built instead was one of Australia's defining technology companies, Jira, Confluence and a developer-beloved toolkit sold, unusually, with almost no traditional sales force. Atlassian took its first outside funding only in 2010, and went public on the Nasdaq in December 2015, a listing that made Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar Australia's first home-grown tech billionaires. For more than two decades the two ran the company as co-CEOs, an arrangement rare enough to be a case study in itself.

That chapter closed in 2024. Farquhar stepped down as co-chief executive at the end of August, remaining on the board as a special adviser, and since September 2024 Cannon-Brookes has been Atlassian's sole CEO, the first time in the company's history that one of the pair has held the wheel alone.

The other crusade

The same reflex that produced the Team Anywhere report, find a thing that is broken, refuse to accept it, try to change it, has made Cannon-Brookes the most conspicuous climate activist in Australian business. Through his family investment office Grok Ventures, founded in 2016, and the climate fund Boundless Earth, he has poured private wealth into the energy transition with a campaigner's appetite for confrontation.

Two episodes stand out. In 2022 Grok built a stake in AGL Energy, long Australia's largest single emitter of greenhouse gases, explicitly to block a demerger he argued would slow the company's exit from coal, an activist intervention extraordinary for its scale and its frankness about motive. And he became the rescuer of Sun Cable, the audacious plan to power Singapore from a vast solar-and-battery farm in the Northern Territory; when the venture collapsed into administration in 2023, Grok bought it out of the wreckage and kept it alive. Time named him to its inaugural climate list that year.

It is the corporate philosophy applied to a planet: don't argue about whether the system is comfortable, look at whether it works, and if it doesn't, change it, preferably with evidence in hand.

The founder's job

For all the data, Cannon-Brookes is not a technocrat at heart. He is a builder with a temperament, and he describes the work in unexpectedly human terms.

"I get frustrated when things don't work the way they should. And then I try to change them."

That single sentence, offered in a recent Atlassian interview about leading in the age of AI, is as clean a key to the man as any. It explains the spreadsheet behind the office debate and the war chest behind the climate fight in the same breath. In the same conversation he framed leadership as a fight against complacency, "the founder's job is to fight the entropy of ambition", and warned that the instinct to defend would not survive the coming technological churn: "You can't defend your way through it, you have to create."

Whether the distributed-work thesis ultimately wins is not yet settled; the corporate world is still mid-argument, and Atlassian is, conveniently, the firm that sells the tools async work depends on. But that is rather the point of how he makes the case. Cannon-Brookes is not asking anyone to take remote work on faith. He counted a thousand days, published the ledger, and dared the rest of the room to do the same. In a debate run mostly on instinct, that is its own kind of provocation, and, for a man whose stated reflex is to fix what is broken rather than defend what is familiar, an entirely characteristic one.