Rework

Summary

This book is about how to build a business in a non-traditional way. It is based on the experiences of the authors founding and running their company 37signals and how they did that from first principles.Rework promotes a lean, efficient, and practical approach to building successful companies without the typical bureaucracy, lengthy planning, or over-complication.

Key Ideas

• Planning is Guessing: The world is rapidly changing and you don't know in advance how it is going to change, it is better to move fast, implement things, see what sticks and what doesn't and then improve upon that. It almost always beats making big plans that ultimately fail, because reality turned out to be different.
• Workaholism Isn't Productive: You can get more done if you work less, but work smart. And solving the right problems is often more important than putting in lots of hours, this idea is mirrored by The 4-Hour Work Week. As a corollary, working a lot and seeming busy can become it's own cult. You can put in as many hours as you want, but if you have no results to show for your work, it didn't matter.
• Meetings are Toxic: This is true especially for creative work such as coding or writing, this idea is beautifully explored by Paul Graham in one of his essays – Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule.
• Don't Look for Outside Investors: Investors dictate what you can and can't do because they want their shares to increase. A profitable but non-growing business is bad for investors, even while it might be good for you. Hence it is best to bootstrap businesses because this way one can focus on sustainable cashflow over growth. Which is the best, if the goal is retiring or having an alternative to 9 to 5 work.
• Make Decisions Quickly: Most decisions are reversible, so deciding, then moving along that path and seeing where it leads is often the best choice available. If it doesn't lead anywhere you most likely learned something that helps you decide on what to do next.
• Start Small and Build Incrementally: This idea is fundamental to Lean Startups and related to the idea of planning is guessing.
• Focus on Core Values and Mission (or) Don't Try to Please Everyone: This could also be re-phrased as find your niche and cater to your target audience. Knowing what you want to do and why you want to do it is a powerful force in businesses. If you are on a mission, a lot of details and decisions follow from that, making it easier to decide quickly. This ideally leads to a fly-wheel of value generation.

In summary, Rework offers advice on how to run a successful, small to medium scale business. In doing so the book challenges traditional practices, instead promoting simplicity, sustainability, and independence as core values of a company. Fried and Hansson argue for a lean, flexible, and customer-centered approach, encouraging businesses to avoid overplanning and to work efficiently.

It reminds me of the ideas of a lot of other people in the "building in public space", like levels.io.

To be honest, I didn't like the book too much, because I already knew many of the ideas from other books like The Lean Startup or Naval Ravikant's almanack.