Hi All,

One of my seniors gave this book to me: Rework (Authors: Jason Fried & David Heinemeier). As I looked at the cover and read the title, it appeared to be a routine motivational (dos and don’ts) book…

However, as I started reading the same; I realized that I was so wrong…

a) Everything is ASAP.
b) All decisions can be taken in ‘long’ meetings.
c) Managers don’t do work; they just delegate.
d) By-products are useless.
e) Life is a race. Compete with the entire world.
f) Learn from your mistakes.
g) Planning is essential
h) Advertisements are required to sell your products /services.

These are the common notions which I had heard millions of times in various seminars (or webinars) and read several times on the Internet or in the books.

However, this book challenged all these universally accepted notions and forced me to don the thinking hat again. We will discuss these one by one:

a) ASAP or As Soon As Possible is a very subjective term. Nobody knows the time-duration by the word ‘soon’. Moreover, this term (ASAP) needs to be used very judiciously. If we will use it on every interaction (or our client uses it with us), then we will not be able to differentiate between a really urgent issue over a normal issue as both are tagged as ‘ASAP’.

b) Meetings have evolved as formal ways to kill time: people don’t have crisp agendas, they don’t adhere to the agendas and the meetings are not ‘time-boxed’. This term is perhaps taken from Agile where Daily Stand-up meetings are really very small in duration, crisp in agendas and clear in decisions. Also, people remain ‘stand up’ during the meetings so that the ‘unease’ would force them to timebox the meeting.

c) Classically, managers were the people famous (or notorious) for delegating work only; however, the authors stated that the ‘manager’ should contribute to the Productive work (the real work) else, it would be a waste of one valuable human-resource.

d) While coding for a large product, ever thought of bookmarking small-re-usable pieces of code for future products? If no, it is high time to do the same. Nothing is useless; use all the by-products. Henry Ford learned to turn wooden scraps from the production of Model Ts into Charcoal briquettes. He built a Charcoal plant ‘Ford Charcoal’ (later renamed as Kingsford Charcoal). It is still the largest charcoal plant in the US.

If Henry Ford can learn, why can’t we?

e) Never compete. If you compete with your competitors, you are bound to traverse the same path and certainly reach at the same destination.
As a result, your products/services would be similar to the ones owned by your competitors.

Let your clients know you with your distinctiveness (no copy-paste allowed). Take calculated risks, tread the un-trodden paths, carve your own niche and scratch your itch.

f) Everybody says: learn to do things; from your mistakes. On the contrary: you can only learn the things which should not to be done; from your mistakes.

g) Planning is essential. However, if the project is large and needs to delivered over a long duration (say a few months), then the long term planning is liable to fail. In this case, planning needs to be divided into smaller ‘deliverable’ chunks as prevalent in scrums. A large to-do is list is bound to be ignored; make

several small to-do lists (each with different story points) and following the same religiously would do the magic.

h) Advertisements make people aware of your products. Large companies can support advertisements; what about the financially-crunched small companies? Does that mean: their products are not sold? Focus on the quality of your products to an extent that people get addicted to it (like the drugs) and the people can’t do without your products.

Remember, the word of mouth is the best form of publicity and that too: completely ‘free’.

The authors (Jason and David) are the founders of the company ’37 Signals’. Their budget was limited, team strength was low: 16 and still they gave a fully Agile compatible programming framework Ruby on Rails to this world.

Hats Off guys!

To sum-up, I would say: it is a must-read book for everybody.