Rework – Fried & Hansson

If you have read Getting Real you’ll notice some overlap with Fried’s (@jasonfried) and Hansson’s (@dhh) new book “Rework”. Despite that, it’s a great business book. Especially, but not only, for those who want to create a small business.

Some randomly picked stuff I specially liked:

• Learning from mistakes is overrated – Learn from successes instead. They make a really good point here. After making a mistake you still might not know how to do it actually the right way. If you did something successfully however, this becomes crystal clear.
• Workaholism – Working longer hours often results in getting less work done instead of more.
• Try to solve your own problems. The advantage of that is, that you exactly know what is the problem because it’s your own. Moreover you probably have a pretty good idea about how to solve it.
• Don’t think or talk about doing something, do it.
• No time is no excuse. If you don’t find time to do what you want you don’t really want.
• Businesses who think about an exit strategy, start thinking at the wrong end. Think about how you can grow your business. That’s the road to success.
• Constraints help you to be creative. Embrace constraints instead of seeing them as real limiting factors.
• Start at the epicenter – Meaning: What’s the core of your product? Start there, don’t think about stuff you don’t necessarily need. Don’t think about problems you don’t have yet.
• Less is more
• Launch early, get good feedback.
• Interruptions are one big productivity killer
• So are meetings, just that they multiply it by the number of persons who take part in the meeting
• Most meetings are not necessary. Try to limit them as much as you can. Think about it that way: A meeting with 5 person for 1 hour is really 5 hours of work which could get done instead.
• Split big tasks into small ones. That’s easier to manage.
• With that goes: Make many small decisions instead of big bold ones.
• Don’t copy. If you want to do something that’s “like” your competitors product or service you already lost.
• Say no by default – Don’t say to everything yes, think about new features carefully, see if they really are needed, if they really fit to the product.
• Out teach your competition – Teaching customers is an easy way to compete even with the big players. And it’s mostly for free.