It doesn’t have to be crazy at work (book by Fried & Hansson)

It doesn’t have to be crazy at work

Jason Fried and David Hansson

It doesn't need to be crazy

The two authors were the principle co-founders of a company called Basecamp. The company produces software that is used by (mostly small) businesses for project management. The company was founded in about 2000 and has been profitable for every year of its existence. The company has not gone public and is itself quite small (about 50 people). It sells access to their software by subscription and has over 100,000 client companies. By most measures this is a successful entrepreneurial start-up.

The book is not about any of that, but about their working practices. They decided fairly early in the life of the company that they wanted a calm life – not the frenetic all-nighter masochism that is commonly associated with entrepreneurs. Some of the major themes appearing in the book include:

• Everybody has work to do and that work requires concentration. Since their work is just as important as your work, you should not interrupt them by sending an IM, then an email, then a phone call. Just send an email and do something else until they respond.
• Basecamp has an open office, but they use library rules. Quiet work or quiet conversations. Use a small meeting room for meetings.
• Meetings should be used sparingly and involve few people. Better to set out a proposal in written form and get written feedback, than present to a group. This leads to more objective and thought-through action.
• Work is given to teams and they are in control of the work. There are no status meetings, but teams do post a brief status update each Friday.
• Basecamp uses small autonomous teams for almost everything. Two coders and one designer is the standard team. Work is made small enough for three to do.
• Work is also made small enough to be done in 6 or fewer weeks. History has shown that this makes it easy for teams to complete and, at the same time, helps them focus their effort. One form that control takes is that the team can prune the work to fit the time. This is one expression of their autonomy.
• Project teams work on a maximum eight week cycle. They work on a project for 6 weeks and then decompress for two weeks before starting again. This is particularly interesting because of the following other working practices.
  • People work for no more than eight hours a day for five days a week.
  • Except in the summer when it is four days of eight hours each.
  • There are very few occasions when the unfinished work can’t wait for the next day.
• Vacation is so important that the company pays for it. In addition to paying for the time (3 weeks), the company will give the employee up to $5000 each year for vacation. People are expected to completely disconnect when they go on vacation.
• Many companies launch updates on Friday so that they have the weekend to make repairs. Basecamp launches on Mondays and repairs during regular hours.
• Basecamp avoids dealing with large companies because:
  • They want to control what Basecamp does
  • They are used to being accommodated, which makes them a hassle. For example, they call at 11PM with a “request” and expect rapid action.
  • It is lower risk and less hassle to have many customers who do not need to be “sold” Basecamp. Basecamp does not have sales in the regular sense.
  • They once tried having business development to explore new business. It was hard work, so they stopped it.
• There is this idea of low hanging fruit. Low hanging fruit are an illusion based on looking at things from a distance. A kind of grass is greener on the other side. If it is worth doing, it will take effort.
• The most valuable time can be expert time. Expert work requires focus, so it is important to protect experts from interruption. Experts are encouraged to have “office hours” when they are not focused and available to help anybody. If you need an expert’s input, you use the hours. If it really is urgent, you send them a message explaining the problem and they choose whether to respond. Otherwise, you can figure it out on your own or wait until they are available. Many of the practices described seem to have the philosophical basis that people are equally important, and that I do not have the right to interrupt you.
  • At Basecamp, all calendars are invisible. If you want a meeting with someone, you ask for it. You do not assume that they are available for you to schedule.
• There are a limited number of job descriptions in the company. Everybody in a job is paid the same. There are no bonuses, but there are benefits. There are no stock options – people are paid salaries at the upper end of the market. If the owners choose to sell the company, employees will get a share of the proceeds.
• There is no long-term plan and no long-term planning. Because project cycles are short, Basecamp can easily take a new idea and get to work on it in a few weeks. Given a few weeks to think about the new idea, it often turns out to be not so good. Many companies seem unable to drop an idea once it has be put into the plan. At the same time, once a project is initiated – it gets finished.
• In 20 years, Basecamp has had three major products. All are running today. Customers can upgrade, but are not forced to upgrade. Basecamp gives their established customer the choice. Basecamp supports all three products. But the product is constantly being improved to be more efficient and effective and to keep up with changes in the computing environment.
• Basecamp places great value on launching their product. They do some amount of internal testing, but understand that they can’t really do enough to prevent problems. So after some testing, they launch and expect to make repairs. In this context, they do not do beta tests with customers and focus groups to see how customers might respond. They use their own judgment about what will be useful and launch. Sometimes they are wrong and the repair is to remove the change. More often, they are right. In this context, it is worth noting that the Basecamp people are constantly doing projects, constantly communicating about projects, constantly starting and ending projects. They are completely immersed in the work that they are building tools for. They are a small company just like their customers. They have credible opinions about what will be good or not.
• Basecamp is growing, but growth is not a goal. Serving customers profitably is a goal. Growth makes companies take actions that increase craziness. For example, they hire people and do not spend enough time and effort to teach them how to work together. They try to get more work out of the people without recognizing that good work does not come from tired people. Part of the emphasis on a 40 (or 32) hour week is that this keeps people fresh. Real vacations keeps them fresh. Decompression periods keeps them fresh. The book talks about the importance of getting 8 hours of sleep consistently. Every 3 years, employees are sent on one month sabbaticals. Employees are provided funds for continuing education with no requirement that it be work related. By insuring fresh minds, teams can do more high quality work. The emphasis is not on volume or seeking new customer segments or chasing big accounts.
• Basecamp does not think business is war or conflict. It does not think of winning or losing – because that causes stress. Other companies have copied Basecamp features, but that does not worry them either. Basecamp does worry about happy customers and employees.
• Promises cause stress, so they avoid them. One time they promised to add a feature by a certain time. They did it but it converted what was a good idea into a pain and disruption. Promises become anchors – not engines.
• Many promises are accompanied by the phrase, “Whatever it takes”. This is the sort of statement made by the people who won’t be doing the ‘whatever’. The book describes the ‘whatever it takes’ as an iceberg because you can’t really see the work that you are promising. Keeping this promise might make you crazy.
• They are constantly seeking to do less. Rather than adding features, they seek to remove them. At one point, they went from accepting checks and credit cards to just accepting credit cards. Handling checks was a bunch of extra work, so they stopped it.
• Best practices are best avoided. Organizations are never actually similar, so best for company A probably does not fit company B. best practices for a company of 10 people, block the changes needed when the company reaches 30 people. It is also worth noting that best practices are usually described by people from outside the company who probably do not see how it really works or the problems the best practice creates. Best practice implies that there is a single right answer or approach – when there may be many equally good ones. They are a mind trap.
• There is this common idea that everything is going faster, bigger, better and so forth. If someone sends you a message, you need to reply in 10 minutes and next time 5 minutes and next time 1 minute, and eventually before they send the message. That’s crazy. It is important to figure out what is good enough and settle for that. Don’t get hustled into faster, faster, faster. That makes you crazy.
• Most decisions should be made by a single person with input from others. People can commit to a decision when they think they were really heard and that the decision was not pre-made. Then people can present their ideas and arguments with full force knowing that the decision will be made with the input.
• Most companies make a big thing of coordination. Basecamp has learned that coordination is over-rated. Rather than making things run smoother, interdependencies trip people up, slow things down and often confuse things. They launch things when they are ready and don’t worry about having one big deal launch.

There are a lot of business practices that can’t really be supported. One of the biggest is the failure to think about how to protect and enable the most important resource any business has – its people. By making work more stressful, companies degrade their people. By preventing them from getting their work done (by allowing too many meetings, too many interruptions, and too many promises), they force people to work tired or distracted. Technology has made it even easier to wear out people and it is up to management to prevent this. It actually is not that hard, but it is different.

Observation and comment:

• I worked with someone who had a cartoon by their desk that said, “A lack of planning on your part does not create an emergency on my part.”
• I don’t anything about software projects, but I do not something about ingredient projects. I am fascinated by the idea of projects with fixed end dates and wonder how you could take an ingredient project and break it into many little 3-person projects that would all come together. Apparently, Basecamp teams have two skill sets. But ingredient development usually involves many skill sets. No team would contain all the required skills to do everything. But this approach begins to show how agile project management might work and how it might differ from conventional project management.
• I was taught to teach my soccer players the following idea – ‘hurry up but don’t rush’. Playing fast puts pressure on the other team, but rushing puts pressure on yourself. In business, I think there might be a version that looks something like ‘work hard – don’t rush’.