Imagine working at a fairly large-sized company.
The success of your companies’ work requires collaboration and coordination across teams.
The business is founder-led, has seen consistent annual growth, and has launched numerous new businesses over the last 2 decades. One of those businesses is the architecture on which modern web coding is based, among others.
Imagine also that there are no meetings, ever.
That there are no managers- the company is completely flat.
There are no annual budgets.
There are no growth forecasts or long-range financial plans.
There is no traditional advertising.
The company has no board of directors.
There is no just checking-in, drive-by interruptions, or “touch-bases”.
Sounds like a fake company, doesn’t it.
If you’ve ever worked in a company of more than 25 people, it would be unimaginable that such a place exists or could function.
Yet, it does. In fact, it thrives and is a well-known company led by founders who are highly-followed individuals on the internet foundersphere.
Their products are used by millions of customers, large and small.
This is Basecamp
Founded by partners- Jason Fried and David Hanson, Basecamp started as a digital web design agency and has evolved into project management software, an email service, and Ruby on Rails open-sourced web development framework.
But I’m not here to talk about their business.
I’m here to talk about their book, Rework. I’ve only just read it and my only regret is not having discovered it earlier.
The book discusses their philosophy on how to start, operate, and scale (or not scale) a company.
Their approach would put McKinsey and Bain & Co out of business. It’s a simple, straightforward operating model that highly values individual employee contribution and tosses out all of the structural redundancy within which most companies operate.
It’s damn refreshing.
The book is chock-full of nuggets.
Three ideas that stand out for me out of many great insights.
You need less than you think
Small is beautiful. The founders at Basecamp stay intentionally small. They keep their core product- Basecamp, lean in features. They don’t add people to the team just because they discover talent. They don’t chase new ideas for the sake of growth.
This thinking would rattle the most seasoned corporate executive where you’re a hero for driving growth. Where “serving the customer” often drives adds incremental features or products, which drives complexity, which drives the need for more people in order to manage the complexity.
Work is not celebrated.
Results are.
There is no credence given to workaholics, people who thrive on working all hours, “busy people”, or those who complain about having so much to do. These are all signals of a problem. Typically, this is the case because there isn’t enough time to do the actual work. Meetings, check-ins, interruptions, decks, managing-up, and urgent projects all consume time and brainpower. At Basecamp, none of these things exist, so if someone demonstrates workaholicism, either the work isn’t being simplified enough or the person doesn’t know how to be effective at their job.
Embrace constraints, not possibility.
Doing so forces you to decide what is actually essential in your work or product. It prevents scope creep, that dreaded natural force in corporate projects. It forces action and promotes iteration. Once you have something live in the market, you’ve got something to react to. Until then, the possibility of an idea doesn’t really accomplish anything.
Could you survive at a company like Basecamp? Could you thrive there?
This book is a reminder that if you do what everyone else does, you may get the same results.
Chart your own path to create results that stand out from the crow.
Leave a Reply