Book Club #2: Rework, by Jason Fried
We review books you should read in preparation to buy or sell a business, as well as how to build a company to sell one day.
About the Authors
Jason and David created a company which was originally called 37Signals and was later rebranded as BaseCamp. It’s a project management tool which was also the origin of the code language known as Ruby on Rails.
Why should you read this?
Because it’s not just another business book. We’ve all read plenty of those tired titles, and sometimes you need a book you’re going to flat out disagree with at times.
The authors are opinionated and that’s good because it allows you to take the best of what you agree with into your business. It’s more of a series of reflections than a game-changing formula revolving around a single concept.
Three Takeaways
“Let’s say you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you invite ten people to attend. That’s actually a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You’re trading ten hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time.”
When you examine meetings through this lens, it’s hard not to sit back in a bit of horror. While it may be difficult to implement the “no meetings” policy that they use at Basecamp, you would do well to take a serious look at the reasons and necessities for meetings in your business, and see if Slack, reports or a combination of the two or others couldn’t obliterate some meetings from your schedule and restore some productivity to your schedule.
“How should you keep track of what customers want? Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously…The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over.”
Unlike the quote about meetings, which may take some business owners a minute or two to wrap their minds around, this one feels right at a gut level. Don’t run after each suggestion. Many of the throwaway comments from your customers are best characterized as exactly that: to be thrown away.
“Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again.”
The authors don’t want you fiddling about with throw away internal policies either. Just because something bad happened one time doesn’t necessarily mean you have to fire up a whole policy about it. It’s a big drain on your productivity and time. Obviously, if there’s legal exposure that you need to address, do so. But otherwise, resist the temptation to created a bloated book of policies that reads more like a series of “One time at a company Christmas party, X happened, and now we can’t have nice things anymore.”
You won’t agree with everything in Rework. But you don’t need to. You’ll really treasure the quotables and concepts that resonate with you.
You can find a copy of Rework here. Jason Fried is also on Twitter.
Building a business is a lot of sweat and hard work. But a fair bit of it is learning as well. If you need book recommendations on building, buying, or selling, we have plenty to give you. Just ask!
