MBA1138 Must Read: It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

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Today's must read is it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen. Jason Fried and DHH are the founders of Basecamp, a very popular team management tool on the Internet. They are New York Times bestselling authors. They have two other books that I reviewed here on the show. One is called Rework and the other one's called Remote. But this time around this book is a little bit different. They pull back the curtain and talk about how they their own company. They share a lot of interesting things that most people do not share. How they interview how they do payments in increments, how they deal with holidays and days off, their development cycles, their team culture, their transparency, all that stuff. All the things that we all want to know when we're building a company. I actually pre ordered this book before it came out because I couldn't wait to read it and boy was I not disappointed. I can't wait to share with you some of its insights, some of the things that really are different about this book. Reading this book I really was challenged by some of the concepts that they were presenting. I had to really ask myself, hey, why am I having resistance to this idea? Maybe I should consider it. I'll tell you what I'm talking about in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work is a very interesting read from the start. You realize this book is really about the anti startup. They're really going against the grain here and saying we are not down with this crazy environment at work these days. They're emphatically saying it doesn't have to be crazy. They're against this hustle to your eyeballs bleed mentality, not getting enough sleep, not having enough time off, not having a work life balance. And they talk about how you can create a company that's profitable but at the same time has these values. If you don't know the authors of this book, Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen, they're the founders of Basecamp, which is a self funded company. It's a private company. They don't have any investors, which means that they can grow at their own pace. This is a huge contributing factor to allowing themselves to have a calm work environment. And that's how the book kind of starts out, explaining what they mean by a calm work environment. Let me read you a passage from this book that really illustrates this. Chaos should not be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn't a prerequisite for progress. Sitting in meetings all day isn't required for success. These are all perversions of work, side effects of broken models and follow the lemmings off the cliff. Worst practices step aside and let the suckers jump. Calm is profitability. Calm is protecting people's time and attention. Calm is reasonable expectations. Calm is about 40 hours of work a week. Calm is ample time off. Calm is smaller. Calm is a visible horizon. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is contextual communication. Calm is asynchronous first real time second, comm is more independence and Less interdependence. Comm is about sustainable practices that can run for for the long term. Wow. That passage alone has you wondering, what's this book all about? Well, I love how they start the book out with this passage because it frames the conversation and it challenges your thoughts about what work and starting a small business or starting an online business is all about. You think you have to work so hard and not sleep and sacrifice everything in order to have some modicum of a victory or a win. They say no, you can do this the right way. And in the book they talk about in order for this to work, to have a calm environment, to have one that you like showing up to every day, you need to have a long term sort of vision. You can't say, hey, I want to build a successful business in six months. What's wrong with thinking about building a business for the next 10 years? This is why they subscribe to the model of not worrying about trying to build a company to sell. Build a company that you can run for a lifetime. A company that can pay your expenses and pay your lifestyle and pay the lifestyle of everybody that's working in that company. So let me tell you about the structure of the book. The book is basically a collection of small essays or short essays I should say. And I like this because it gives you these bite sized ideas to digest. And if you're listening to this book, you're going to want to pause and take some time to absorb what you just listened to. If you're reading, of course, put the book down and just think, do I agree with what's being said here? How would this apply to my own business, if at all? They have a lot of controversial topics in this book. I say controversial, but it's controversial in the entrepreneurial space. One of them is the idea of they have no goals. They have no goals in their business, no sales goals, no targets, no nothing really. All they want to be is profitable. They want to make sure that everybody gets paid. They're growing as a company and the profits are there, but they don't have any goals. And they explain why. And it's a really compelling argument. And at first I was like, what are you talking about? I'm a very goal driven person. I want to achieve my goals. But they touch on the mentality behind chasing goals and that you're never really happy during the chase and then once you reach it, that happiness is very short lived. It's just like a short period of time and then you move on to the next goal. Instead of doing that, they think you really should just focus on the process, the steps you take to live the life you want. And that way you're happy all the time. They also have a huge chapter or section called defend your time in there. There's A chapter called Eight's Enough, 40 is plenty, meaning eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. Totally enough for you to have a profitable company to build. Great work if you're doing the right work, if you're not multitasking and wasting time on things that are just again, a waste of time. Whether it's redundant meetings, whether it's just hanging out on social, whether it's comparing yourself to other companies. No, no, no. They're very big on protecting the time of their employees. And I love this. And I try to do this in my own business as well, where I try to limit the number of times we have to meet or the times I need to take away their time with a conversation. Because the more time they're in meetings, the less time they're going to be working on things that they were hired for their area of expertise, whether it' or design or marketing or sales. So protect your time. But to protect your employees time as well, they also have a really fun chapter called fomo question mark, Jomo, exclamation mark. And Jomo stands for the joy of missing out instead of the fear of missing out. And they talk about how you should really get excited and happy about missing out on things, having less things on your plate so you can have time to have some calm in your life, some peace time to just reflect and enjoy your life. That's another thing that this book really highlighted is that, hey, you have a life outside your business. You have family, you have friends, you have interests, you have your health, you have your well being. You might be interested in music or dance or, you know, sport or whatever it is. There's other things to life other than building a successful business. You need to allow yourself to enjoy these things. And if you don't create a business that allows time for that, it's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. There's always going to be more work for you to do. There's always going to be more things to do. There's always going to be time for you to do things that are outside of life, which is work. Another great section they have is called feed your culture. And there's a chapter in there called we're not family. Very, very interesting where they say, hey, a lot of people say My company, my team, we're like a big family. No, they say we're not family, which is interesting because they say, hey, with family, it's unconditional love and unconditional commitment. And that's not the reality of work. There's conditions. They have to do work in order for them to have the job. You have to pay them in order for them to stick around. There's conditions here, so let's stop pretending it's family. They also recognize, hey, we don't want to be a burden on you. And you have to be able to have time for your own life and your real family. And the more you do that, the more productive your team will be. So they also get into how they build their software. They talk about they have a development team. And within that team they have teams of three. A designer and two developers. And they design and develop all the different aspects of the app Basecamp. And they give full autonomy to these people. They work in six week cycles like they mentioned. And they say, why six weeks? Well, they found that six weeks is enough time to put something out. There's always a good version, a decent version of something that you can create in six weeks. They say, we want to launch a new feature. What's the six week version of that feature? And they launch it and then they improve it later on. They don't mess around with the deadline. It's always six weeks. But if they need to change something, they change the scope of the project. Meaning that they just don't do as much. They don't make that feature so full rich, or I should say feature rich. Right. And that's an interesting concept. Instead of trying to be perfect, they do just enough so there is an improvement and there's constant improvement to the actual product. They also share with you how they actually interview and find qualified candidates. They actually put them in real life example projects. They give them a project to work on for about a couple weeks and they pay them for it. And basically it's like tryouts, like you're trying out for the basketball team in high school. And it's not about who delivers the best result. They want to know how you got to that result. So they're not really concerned about, hey, which is the best design or the best app. They want to know how you made those decisions. And they ask people to write down how they made those decisions to come up with that design or whatever they're being hired for. And through that description of how they make decisions, that's how they decide who to hire. Very interesting. I thought that was really cool.

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To wrap up today's must read episode, it doesn't have to be Crazy at Work. The reason why I would recommend this book is that it challenges the way you think about running a company, about building a company, especially a bootstrapped, self funded company. It also encourages you to think way into the future long term instead of thinking about I need results right now and the way the company has to look in the next year. It also encourages you to think about the life you want to have and building a business around it. It doesn't have to be any certain way other than the way you want it. And I love that. I love this about the book and even though I like Remote and Rework the two other books that these authors have written, this is my favorite book by Jason Freed and David Hanemeier Hansen. Check it out. You will not be disappointed. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you read a great book and want to recommend it to me, I'd love to hear about it. Just email me at omar00mba.net so I can get your recommendation. Thank you so much. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The best books I found are the books that challenge you, not the ones that just endorse the opinions you already have. To me, that's sort of a waste of time. I want something that's gonna make me think differently, where even if it doesn't change my mind, at least it confirms or denies those opinions. I want something that makes me reevaluate the way I think about things. That's how we learn that's how we grow, that's how we change, and that's how we develop. So I love a book that's a bit controversial, introduces new ideas. I encourage you to look out for those types of books, courses, opportunities, trainings when you can. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.