The World Is Your Office: How Work from Anywhere Boosts Talent, Productivity, and Innovation
Prithwiraj Choudhury
Harvard Business Review Press (April 2025)

“The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.” W. Edwards Deming

Wherever you work is your “office.” Check out the etymology and you will learn that the original meaning of “office” is “the place where work is done.” (Middle English: via Old French from Latin officium ‘performance of a task’; in medieval Latin also ‘office, divine service’), based on opus ‘work’ + facere ‘do’.)

For Pablo Picasso, a studio; for Julia Child, a kitchen; for Claude Monet, within gardens or near a lily pond; for Mozart and Beethoven, wherever their preferred piano is located; for Donald Ross, the terrain for which he is designing a golf course.

In fact. most people have several “offices” because the nature of what they produce could require them to work in several different places: in their employer’s office building, their home, their customer’s location(s), and /or aboard a commuter train or airline flight. For years while on the road, I often completed some of my most important work in a hotel room or aboard an airline flight.

As Prithwiraj Choudhury notes, “work from anywhere also enables companies to hire anywhere.” Here is how he organizanizes the material in The World Is Your Office:

PART ONE: How and why Working from Anywhere (WFA) is the new talent strategy
PART TWO: Managerial strategies to implement WFA
Appendix A: Digital Nomad Visa Policies Across Countries
Appendix B: The Traditional Model for Relocating Talent: A Summary of the Research

I commend to your attention TABLE 1.1: “Summary of terms describing [ten] work arrangements.” It provides a superb context, a frame of reference, for most of Choudhury’s key points. With regard to WFA’s benefits, they are best viewed and understood within a multiple “win” framework: the winners include workers, their supervisors and associates, customers, service providers, and shareholders.

As the subtitle of The World Is Your Office correctly suggests, WFA can help boost talent, productivity, and innovation for both workers and for their organization.

One of Prithwiraj Choudhury’s most important points is that WFA can be a multiple “win” for everyone involved: workers, their family members, their business associates, and their customers. That said, WFA is not for all organizations or for all workers. However, in ways and to an extent previously unavailable, AI (properly applied and supervised — can help almost any organization to devise and then implement WFA wherever possible with human resources best suited to take full advantage of the benefits available.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The World Is Your Office: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to Appendices A and B: “Digital Nomad Visa Polices across Countries” (Pages 123-125) and “The Traditional Model for Relocating Talent: A Summary of the Research.” (Pages 127-153)

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.