Name: Hayder's review of It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Heinemeier Hansson
Item: It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
Rating: 4
Author: Hayder

David Heinemeier Hansson

Jason Fried

In this timely manifesto, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework broadly reject the prevailing notion that long hours, aggressive hustle, and "whatever it takes" are required to run a successful business today. In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson introduced a new path to working effectively. Now, they build on their message with a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture—what they call "the calm company." Their approach directly attack the chaos, anxiety, and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and hampers billions of workers every day. Long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for modern professionals. But it should be a mark of stupidity, the authors argue. Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for large organizations—individuals, contractors, and solopreneurs are burning themselves out the same way. The answer to better productivity isn’t more hours—it’s less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress. It’s time to stop celebrating Crazy, and start celebrating Calm, Fried and Hansson assert. Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. "Calm" has been the cornerstone of their company’s culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn’t a book telling you what to do. It’s a book showing you what they’ve done—and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work

david

Hayder

Mark Palfreeman 

Typical punchy Basecamp writing style, doesn't go into much detail but makes clear concise points. 

Not unlike Rework, but good simple ideas about business to come back to when you need a little inspiration.

Bouke van der Bijl

Nice and concise book that’s all content and no fluff. It’s structured in small chapters that all stand in their own, so it’s easy to read a couple of chapters and then go do something else. 

Some of my favorites were:

The outwork myth – its a myth that you can outwork the competition by working 80 hours instead of a healthy rhythm. Doing this will just leave you in shambles. 

Nobody hits the ground running – don’t expect to start a new job/role and immediately providing value. You will take a while to properly ramp up, I remember it probably took about a year for me at Shopify before I kind of felt like I knew what was going on. 

Don’t change the world – not every idea/business needs to change the world. You can create a lot of value in your business without ‘disrupting’ industries and ‘destroying’ the competition.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework, are back with a manifesto to combat all your modern workplace worries and fears. It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a direct successor to Rework, the instant bestseller that showed readers a new path to working effectively. Now Fried and Heinemeier Hansson have returned with a new strategy for the ideal company culture - what they call "the calm company". It is a direct attack on the chaos, anxiety and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and billions of people working their day jobs. Working to breaking point with long hours, excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honour for many people these days, when it should be a mark of stupidity. This isn't just a problem for large organisations; individuals, contractors and solopreneurs are burning themselves out in the very same way. As the authors reveal, the answer isn't more hours. Rather, it's less waste and fewer things that induce distraction, always-on anxiety and stress. It is time to stop celebrating crazy and start celebrating calm. Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. "Calm" has been the cornerstone of their company's culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn't a book telling you what to do. It's a book showing you what they've done--and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

Nick Gracilla

A good, quick read on many of the values that drive success at Basecamp: an exploration of what choosing calm at work can mean for employees, productivity, and product. A great takeaway for me was avoiding "knee-jerk" responses: we take time to create presentations, both internally and to clients—why wouldn't we want to give time for a considered response, as opposed to a top-of-mind reaction? Many of the chapters explore the fruitful outcomes of turning conventional wisdom on its head: competition for talent (versus developing/nurturing your own); narrowing focus over time (versus growth at any cost); launching and learning (versus ongoing strategy or CX interviews). Recommended.

Julien Sobczak

When common sense reinvents management practices

Sadly, bad practices in the workspace often spread and stop being challenged. In this book, the co-authors explain their current practices at Basecamp, resulting from two decades of experimentation. And when you experiment, you learn a lot, and you gain interesting insights, which are related in this excellent book.

The scope is very broad – hiring, office, communication, company vision, stress, vacations, business model, meetings, customer relationship, quality, sleep, productivity, … – everything tightly packed in a short book, full of great ideas.

The authors focused exclusively on Basecamp, a 50-employee, remote-only software company. That is not the “standard” company and everything described will not apply in every context. You will have to experiment too.

I enjoyed reading the book, from the first to the very last page. My intuition was delighted to hear what I was reading. It was telling me non-stop: “You see, I wasn’t so crazy.” If your job requires to be a minimum creative, I urge you to read this book, and appreciate how others are not afraid to be the exception in a corporate world far from being exceptional.

Ammar Alakkad

Full of profanity in a very annoying way.
It's like describing the perfect company, so be careful not to hate yours when you compare it to the perfect one, but rather try to enhance it as possible.

I'd suggest not to read the book, but read a summary of it somewhere it would be more beneficial.

brendan sudol

‘Creativity, progress, and impact do not yield to brute force.’

‘Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”’

‘Time and attention are best spent in large bills, if you will, not spare coins and small change.’

‘The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families. They’re there to provide healthy, fulfilling work environments so that when workers shut their laptops at a reasonable hour, they’re the best husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children they can be.’

‘Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be.’

‘There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.’

‘startups are easy, stayups are hard’

Seyfeddin Başsaraç

37 Signals'ın bütün kitaplarını okudum. Hepsi çok güzel fikirler barındırıyordu, bu kitap da bundan farklı değil. Ama büyük bir eksik var.

Son zamanlarda Amerika'da yeni bir trend başladı: Calm. Silikon vadisinin parlattığı "günde 18 saat çalış, yoksa milyar dolarlar kazanamazsın" fikrinin tam tersini savunan bu akım, eğer sakin ve planlı bir iş hayatı sürdürmezsek, bunun uzun vadede ciddi problemler açacağını söylüyor.

Kitabın yazarlarının kurucusu olduğu Basecamp şirketi de bu "Calm" akımının savunucularından. Kitap kısa kısa pasajlardan oluşuyor, ve her pasaj başka bir konuyu ele alıyor. Bu yüzden okuması da gayet hızlı, 2-3 saatte rahatça bitirebilirsiniz. Diğer kitapları gibi güzel fikirler barındırıyor ancak yazarların aşırı sabit fikirli olması beni rahatsız etti.

Sakinlik ve ekip yönetimi ile ilgili kısımlara fazlasıyla katılsam da, iş modeli, para kazanma ve şirket yönetme ile ilgili kısımlardaki kesin ifadeleri beğenmedim. Basecamp'in ürünü basit bir proje yöneticisi. Ürünün arka planında gelişmiş bir teknoloji kullanmıyorlar. Ekledikleri özelliklerin hepsi proje yönetimini kolaylaştıracak tasarım iyileştirmeleri olan bir şirketin, "ürününüzün tek fiyatı olmalı, 1 milyar dolarlık şirkete de, tek kişiye de aynı fiyattan ürün satmalısınız" tarzı dayatmaları fazla iddialı olmuş. Her ürün Basecamp gibi basit değil.

Özetle kitabın savunduğu tez doğru olsa da, örnekleri çoğaltmak amacıyla seçtikleri konular ve bu konularda diretmeleri kitabı sevmeme engel oldu. Bir önceki kitapları Remote da böyleydi.

3.5/5

Claire Knight

Sadly this won’t apply to all companies but I applaud what they have done at Basecamp. And there are ideas that will translate elsewhere.

It’s also useful to be able to point to and say “but why aren’t we working in a similar way” or “this is the environment I’d like in a new role”. More so they do exist in tech and finding one is freeing and actually empowers you to do better work.

Bryce Thornton

This was a solid book of knowledge, mainly focused on how smaller, self-funded companies can build a great culture. The only reason I'm giving it three stars is that it's full of the same thoughts that the Basecamp crew (Jason and DHH) have been posting about for the past 15 years. Great advice, just nothing too new. If you're not familiar with their views on work then I highly recommend it.

Madhuri Gubbala

Reads like an OB case study of Basecamp. Some interesting and radical views on work life but not something that left me inspired or motivated to make changes.

Omar Fernandez

This book was excellent in various ways: 
* giving an example of a great company that makes unconventional decisions to foster real work-life balance among employees. 
* discussing decisions or pivotal points that cause unnecessary stress and how to avoid them. 
* helping you find ways to create space to think in your workday. 

I personally thought that pretty much everything they talked about was on point. In particular, the discussions around how to make reviews more effective (offline, not in meetings), collaborate effectively without a ton of unnecessary meetings, and turning down long-term attractive projects for the benefit of longer term sanity. 

I'll be listening to the audiobook of this once again end-to-end cause it's short, but filled with moments of "hell yeah, we should do more of that in my team."

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework, are back with a manifesto to combat all your modern workplace worries and fears.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work

Ivaylo Durmonski

If you really want to start a business, you need to think more about staying in business... is just part of what I've learned after reading It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. See all of my notes, here: https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Roger Dean Olden

Short and to the point with easy advice to experiment with and implement in your own worklife/organization. And with experience from running a business traditionally and then changing whats broken the authors paints a picture of a new kind of workplace by questioning rules that exists with the reason "that's how we've always done it".

Ilia Markov

I'm a huge fan of Jason Fried and DHH, but their books read too basic (at least to me)

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It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by David Heinemeier Hansson

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