Management today review of 37signal's "Rework" | Hacker News Reader

Management today review of 37signal's "Rework"

managementtoday.co.uk

70 pointstomh-65 comments

I'm currently reading the book, and he amusingly left out the stats supporting their conclusions or the rest of the sentence which tempers the strong advice. This is obviously intentional.

They say "Don't make plans" and end the sentence with "Before you start, you don't know anything then".

They say "learn from successes, not failures" and back it up with stats about how people who failed at a prior business endeavor are no more likely than first time starters (23% of succeeding), but people who've succeeded at prior business have a much greater chance (forgot that number).

Uneven smear job a stuckup business writer.

I think approaching your work from the standpoint of "Learn from success, not failure" is a sure path to succumbing to confirmation bias and becoming a one-trick pony.

The 37s guys have done some wonderful work. But to me they are pretty much the embodiment of what I think of when I remember Paul Buchheit's great quote:

"Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice"

  I think approaching your work from the standpoint of "Learn
  from success, not failure" is a sure path to succumbing to
  confirmation bias and becoming a one-trick pony.

And the stats mentioned show, that approaching work from standpoint "learn from failure" is a sure path to being zero-trick pony. The stats in question show, that those who failed previously have the same success rate as those who never even tried, and those who succeeded previously have success rate higher by third.

It doesn't tell anything, as you don't know why people failed in the first place and if they learned from their mistakes.

Maybe, people able to learn from mistakes are able to recover them before their business fails...

It's important to realize that this "Rework" book is about the stuff that worked for 37signals and might work for you if you have a similar business. The review points out that this is not always the case from a management perspective and it's not always applicable to other business'.

From the inside flap - "REWORK shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition."

Note that the claim is not 'Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in a business that is similar to 37 signals. Maybe'.

It depends. Maybe. Sometimes. Your milage may vary. Reasonable people understand these apply in most (but not all!) situations.

No doubt. But what the what the OP is trying to do is weasel away from a critique of the book by saying 'Well, it's really mostly about 37 signals. If you don't like it/doesn't work for you, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man'. I imagine you wrote the book with the notion that it is broadly (not universally) applicable, just like most books in the genre. And it's perfectly sensible to review it in those terms, just like this and all other reviews I've seen so far have.

I do think a lot of our ideas can apply to a very broad spectrum of businesses.

I've personally heard from thousands of business owners in just about every industry who've told me many of the ideas we espouse work beautifully for them in their businesses.

But, no of course I don't believe any idea applies to everyone.

Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row.

No need to exaggerate to make your point.

Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row.

Or three days worth of email

Jason, maybe you should just link to this page every time this same kind of issue pops up and save yourself some time: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch01_Caveats_disclaimers_an...

The fact that an italian cooking book tells you that after you read it "you'll be able to cook amazing meals" doesn't mean you'll be able to cook amazing "thai" meals... It also doesn't mean that if you can mix things up and come up with food that you like better, it isn't good food.

Now I'm hungry and still completely confused about the point you are making.

I think the inner flap pretty much every business book I've ever read has said something similar.

I'm pretty sure the copy writers of business book promotional material have some sort of mad lib system for writing that tripe.

This book will _______ by showing you how ______ changed their business by _______ . All answers to your problems inside!

Management is an interesting concept. My personal view on it is that I don't want to work with people who need to be managed.

So don't call it management, call it leadership instead. If you're on a team of peers and you're the natural leader who helps motivate everyone and makes the idea a reality, you are essentially the manager... the PHB, but you are doing it artfully.

In lots of businesses, one is not fortunate enough to be able to hire self-motivated employees, and so management is akin to being the old lady on the school yard with a whistle.

But more broadly, management is the science of motivating people... and anyone who is a "founder" and can't do the project alone must fill those shoes to some extent.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that there is no such thing as management, only mismanagement.

"I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople."

What exactly are "real businesspeople"?

He pretty much says what he means: "I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople. They need to stop behaving like children." -- he means "old businesspeople". Ya'know "professional" people. People who fit in the clip-art image of a businessperson.

I thought the same. It seems to me that a "business person" is someone who runs a business. A Good "business person" runs a successful business and a bad one runs an unsuccessful one. A lot can be said about the way 37 signals self promotes but its hard to deny their success.

Personally I learned a long time ago that there's no business book that can tell me how to run my business. You read some good, some bad and if you're lucky find a few good pearls of wisdom along the way.

Parsed charitably, he means that they aren't serial businesspeople — they ["don't want to", "won't", "can't"] start new independent businesses.

It's a variant of the lifestyle business epithet.

That sounds like a "serial entrepreneur", not a serial businessperson: a "business person" doesn't necessarily ever start a new business, let alone a string of them.

His point is more that they're really Web Developers, not businesspeople. That their expertise is from direct experiential practice with an extremely narrow type of software business.

He's a business school type, so this rankles. His whole world view is based on broadly applicable business practices, grounded in theory and hypothesis, backed up with data.

His kind of "business person" doesn't even necessarily start one business, even if they might see opportunities everywhere — they get brought in as management. But if they start one, they're probably going to start more.

I have a feeling this writer has no idea who 37signals is. He's probably realizing right about now that he's stepped on a land mine with exploding 37signals fanboys.

Edit: No offense to fans of 37signals (I read svn). This guy is about to get a lesson in how many fans of 37signals there are.

I'm guessing he probably knows, and hes trying to be a troll to get hits.

Sort of playing them at their own game?

No, all signs point to the conclusion that 37signals actually believes what they're saying. Quality snark, though!

I have a feeling that author did not even read the book properly: maybe a couple of opening pages and chapter titles.

I read the back cover. That was enough to know it's more of the same. Not for me.

"Fire workaholics", "Meetings are toxic", etc etc it's just linkbait hyperbole.

I think this review managed to accurately sum up what 37signals puts out.

"Meetings are toxic" was in their last book. It's a hyperbolic title, but the content is more subtle. http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php

"Fire workaholics" was a blog post. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics

The review was defensive, because 37signals prove that many typical management techniques are not necessary for success. This is a status risk for the review author, who derives his livelihood from telling people about another right way to do things, and told me more about him than about the book.

Sorry, but I just absolutely detest this sort of writing, where you make outlandish claims, then fallback to a ridiculously obvious position. It's a bait+switch, and it's used way too often. You don't get any real insight, you just read what you already know.

  Meetings Are Toxic
  Don't have meetings
  For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting
  (this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

And the advice is just ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain. "Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

Please.

Are all the startups here having meetings every day without any vague sort of agenda? Would they blindly keep having meetings if they proved to be unproductive? no.

It's great that 37signals have worked this out, but I don't think there's many people who don't know it/can't figure it out for themselves.

>> And the advice is just ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain. "Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

The thing is that in many places it's not obvious. There are a lot of people who spent many years in companies where this wasn't a common practice and they just don't know any better. It's not that these people aren't smart, they've just never seen anything different. Having a 1 hour meeting with a dozen people to solve the most simple problems is just "how things are done".

Let me make a quick analogy.

To a lot of people here, the idea that XP, SCRUM, and other agile development methodologies are a much better way of developing software is "obvious". To many, many people in larger companies it's definitely not obvious. They have decades of experience doing things using waterfall, and most of them have never worked at a place that did anything else. It's just "how things are done".

If you think all of these things are obvious, then this book is likely not for you. For lots of people, this book contains ideas that are very different from what they're accustomed to. That's who will get the most out of this book (or other books of its kind).

  And the advice is just ridiculously obvious to anyone with
  a brain. "Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

Uhm, you assume that someone is actually using brains in average corporation. There is a book titled "Why Do Business Speak like Idiots" (http://fightthebull.com/), worth a read. As the saying goes, common sense is not so common. Do you know many employees in average corporation who like going to meetings and value them? Meetings there happen because managers think it is a good way to manage. Organizing meeting also keeps someone busy—and the common trait is to confuse busyness with productive work. There are lots of things obvious to anyone with a brain and those things never get applied because "that's not the way to do things", "that's not our culture", etc. What "Rework" does is to encourage you to challenge those widely accepted traditions. BTW, I highly recommend Ricardo Semler's "Maverick" and "The Seven-Day weekend" to anyone who even remotely like the stuff 37signals write. Semler also speaks a lot about applying common sense to business. Their stance on meetings is simple—no one is required to attend. If you organize a meeting and nobody shows up, that simply means no one is interested in your idea.

> I think this review managed to accurately sum up what 37signals puts out.

...Which you can assess by virtue of not having read it. Well done!

The book's target audience is obviously "business people," so I'd say he really doesn't need to know details about 37signals specifically.

The review was wonderfully British -- "What is it about Americans that they think 10 years is a long time?" -- which probably is the main reason behind the criticism. Real business people according to the author are probably those with a degree from LSE.

"What is it about Americans that they think 10 years is a long time?"

What is it about the British that make them assume short term thinking is coming from an American? One of the two authors are Danish, not American. Does working in America for four years make you an American these days?

from article "I have the pleasure of working with real businesspeople who care about doing a good job, not talking about doing a good job."

Well, I don't know if he did research about the software that 37Signals has made, but I consider Ruby on Rails a "good job". I haven't used any of their other products (Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire), but I would bet that the 3 million people using them would consider those products to be a "good job" too.

Yes, by the review author's logic, no one should ever write a business book, because they are too busy doing a good job.

Of course, the reviewer neglects to note that writing a book and then selling it successfully and profitably is a case of a businessperson doing a good job.

Funny enough, there is a place in "Rework" which talks about how good job has side-products which can be sold. "Getting real" and "Rework" are exactly such products.

Isn't ROR free? By that standard, I'm sure the BBC is doing a good job.

ROR is free and so are most of the competitors and there a lot now. The BBC is doing a good job, it's news coverage is certainly one the best and most respected in the world and that's got nothing to do with it being free - people would certainly pay if they had to for it.

British Residents do directly pay for the BBC, and not via normal taxes like the US's PBS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...

That's a good point and since I pay it, I should have thought of that. It does seem more like a tax, since you pay it for having a T.V. regardless of weather you watch it or not.

"The book is written by people who, I think, would rather be celebrities than businesspeople."

To a large extent celebrities are businesspeople nowadays. 37s has done nothing if not figure out a brilliant way to turn being web-famous into making money. While I think I'd take their business advice with a mound of salt (mostly because it's all expressed in such absolute terms as to be inherently meaningless) you have to admire the way they've used blogging and internet celebrity to turn a nice profit out of a product you could build in 2 weeks.

The author suggests that 37signals shouldn't "try and make a name for [their] software company by issuing such over-heated generalisations".

Is this book is about making a name for 37signals? Is the Rework Readers -> Basecamp Buyers conversion rate expected to be high?

"Maybe in a low-risk software company you can 'just do it', but if, like a restaurant chain, you have capital expenditure, or you are moving a factory, you had better make sure you plan the move, the stock-build, the overtime, the working capital and service implications."

The author of the review is the "co-founder of Leon Restaurants". Maybe he sees everything from this perspective, and that's why doesn't agree with anything in the book. I think the book is about advice meant for (tech) startups, not restaurants.

"And perhaps if the authors had followed the advice about 'build half a product, not a half-assed product' and 'underdo your competition', the book would have been a deal better."

Is he really trying to say that 37signal's apps are bad ?

All in one I found the review biased and hypocritical, but I'm yet to read the book, so until I do I'll refrain from further comments on the topic.

I imagine the book is really only relevant industries where the real resource is the people and the profit margins can be massive. It seems that Jason's main point would be that in a tech. business you shouldn't squander that main resource (i.e. the people).

The closest analogy I can think to the tech. industry would be the music industry, since it's possible to make a record on virtually no money and have it sell millions. Now, you wouldn't expect Lady Gaga or Jay-Z to sit in endless meetings that they weren't needed in, when they could be making more records, would you?

Lots of other businesses are not really about the people in them like restaurants, bars, manufacturing etc. and that is what the reviewer is getting at. Though the reviewer doesn't seem to know the difference.

old guy doesn't approve of 37 signals, shocking.

Seriously, this is a rather typical old-economy response to a well understood concept at this point: Simple works.

Coming from the inside of the enterprise web publishing world I'd suggest it's not 37signals that is missing something.

Of course the author (of the review) did found a chain of restaurants...

"Simple works". Which is why they created everything with Forth on Rails. Oh wait... it's Tcl on Rails. No... Ruby? Ruby is not simple. It's actually a nice mix of elegance, simplicity and, where called for, fancy ways of handling complexity.

And they host everything on DOS. Because it's simple! No?

I think this stuff goes both ways... you can't just wave "simple!" around.

If you really wanted simple, you'd use a pencil and paper.

Uhm… How about trying to see the difference the product and implementation details? Cars are simple you know: turn a key, step on the gas and you ar going. Does anyone claim that those dozens of CPU hidden under bonnet and AT gearbox is simple?

Some stuff is simple, some isn't. Trying to make it simpler is a good goal in many cases, except for when it isn't.

What I disagree with is "business by platitude".

Did you read his conclusion? The book is rescued by a thread of ideas that focus on one theme - that less ambitious, more straightforward products can often beat 'better' products. And, this time, they give good examples - of the recent uptake of simple fixed-gear bikes, and the popularity of the flip phone

I couldn't see his point through the smog of ad hominem.

I think that in their last podcast, where they talk about Rework, the guys at 37s say that this book is written with entrepreneurs in mind.

Maybe that's why old "real" enterprisey business persons can't understand it.

http://37signals.com/podcast/#episode9 (wow! that's a lousy permalink)

Well you can't blame the reviewer. The whole MT's business philosophy is the antithesis of 37signal's. As somebody said (it's a famous quote, forgotten its origin though):

"Don't expect somebody to learn something when his stomach depends on him not learning it"

Wow: this review, and now these comments, what a microcosm of the generation gap...

"In reality, good meetings are good and bad meetings are not good". Yeah, because we'd rather read a book of tautologies than some actual points.

I think you're missing his point. He's saying it would be more helpful if the authors explained what it is about bad meetings that makes them bad, rather than issuing a blanket condemnation on all meetings.

Authors do explain. They even provide some guidelines how to make productive meeting. It's just the reviewer who chooses to ignore that.

He doesn't ignore it, he just points out that the slogans contradict the actual advice, which is pretty run-of-the-mill.

I'll read the book and formulate my own opinion on it. Thank you.

One of the points of a review is to suggest whether you should or should not spend your valuable time reading a book in the first place.

The fact that the book is written by 37 signals (the people behind Basecamp) compels me to read it on that merit alone. Just to get some insight from people who actually have proven themselves in the marketplace.

In that light, it's useful to compare reviews of books you have already read with your own assessments of those books. That way you can get a sense of which reviewers are more likely to write future reviews that will dovetail with your own values and expectations.

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