Rework – review of book by 37signals

Mar 25, 2010

Wow. 37signals did it again. I just finished reading Rework and it rocks. Just like their other products. No matter if you are entrepreneur, progammer, running small or big business – this is must read. I do read tons of books all the time, and very small amount of them are in higher league. Those book are of kind which you start reading and after 30 minutes you know you have to postpone your evening plans, because the book is so good that you dont want to make any breaks in reading. Jack Welch’s Winning has it. Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! has it. Just as Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The book have some magic inside that immediately make you feel that you are reading something big, and you don’t want to loose even a bit of it.

Rework is a collection of short texts (almost like blog entries), 1-3 page each, and each entry describes some topic – precisely, and often shockingly. The topics are then categorized into chapters like “Productivity”, “Promotion”, “Hiring”, “Culture” and so on.

The main message of book is quite coherent, and it turn upside down all common knowledge how business should be ran:

• Remove features instead of adding them – it will keep your product in good quality
• Do not follow “Fail early, fail often” dogma – it doesn’t give you any progress
• Stay small, don’t hire without really good reason – small team is agile, big company have too much inertia
• Don’t make your team working more than 8 hours per day – or you will burn them quickly. Go for marathon, not sprint.
• Scratch your own itch – do product having yourself as a client
• No time is no excuse – people are making excuses like “I don’t have time”, or “I don’t have money”. But these are only excuses – even working few hours each evening will allow you to build something great.
• and so on, 1-2 pages for topic like that, topic by topic, for almost 300 pages.

They tell what not to do, what to do, and how to do it. And their way of telling it is full of energy – I got really motivated by the book, motivated to do better products and do it in a better way. For example, during last few months I’ve been running my own business, and I was worried that I’m alone and wanted to hire somebody as soon as possible. Now I understand that might not be the best decision, and it will be better to wait more and do more stuff alone.

In general, if you attend some seminar or read a book, and learn just 1 new important thing, it is worth to spend $20 on the book or $300 for seminar, just to had that single thought of inspiration. Rework will give you many thoughts like this, for only $13.20 (and few hours of reading). Will you pay such price for improving your business and getting more clients & audience? I did, and it was great deal for me.