ReWork is really a different economics book when it comes to business problems like “Less is better” or “Meetings are poison”. Because of that, this is not just a book that teaches readers about business "tricks". The book is succinct, concise, and easy to understand for anyone who wants to position themselves in life whether they want to run a business or not.
It does not pose big problems like economic groups, nor does it bring the stereotypical, rigid, different economic principles to inspire readers to live, to work, to break free from the problems. boring stuff around and be proud of what you've accomplished.
Who should read this book:
- Anyone who has been dreaming of creating something with their own strength
- Anyone interested in how business is in the 21st century
- Anyone trying to create a productive work environment
About the author
Jason Fried is a software entrepreneur; David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish-American programming expert, author of the famous programming language Ruby on Rails.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson are the founders of 37 Signals, a pioneering software company that produces application software trusted by millions of people around the world. They are also co-authors of Signals vs.Noise, one of the most popular blogs out there.
Chapter 1 – The Beginning
There is a new reality: today, anyone can do business. Tools that were once out of reach are now easy to obtain. One person can do the work of two or more people. Things that were impossible a few years ago are now simple. Now you can work from home or collaborate with people who live thousands of miles away that you've never met. It's time to change the way you work. Let's begin.
Chapter 2 – Bringing Down
Ignore the real world. The real world seems to be an extremely boring place. That's where new ideas, strange methods, and outlandish concepts always fail.
In the real world, you can't attract millions of customers without any salespeople or advertising campaigns. In the real world, you can't reveal the secret of your success to others. However, we did all that and still thrived.
Don't celebrate learning from mistakes. People often advise you "failure is the mother of success". Another misconception: you need to learn from your failures.
Do the opposite by learning from your successes. When you succeed at something, you know what works and you can keep doing it, and possibly do better. Failure is not a prerequisite for success. Evolution doesn't linger on past failures, it always builds on what worked.
Planning is judgment. There are many factors beyond your control: competitors, customers, the economy… planning makes you feel like you have control over things that you really can't. Plans are judgments. Plan to let the past rule the future. Planning contradicts improvisation. You must be able to seize the opportunity when it comes. Leave the guesswork out. Decide what you're going to do for a week, figure out the next most important thing and do it.
Don't make assumptions about the size of your business. Take it slow and see what works. Avoid outbursts of growth. Don't feel insecure about running a small business. A business that can stand and can be profitable, whether it is small or large, its creators are proud.
Work addiction. Know that work addiction is not only unnecessary, but also stupid. Workaholics like to work overtime to feel like heroes sacrificing themselves for their careers.
If your mind is always working, you will have a hard time making good judgments, your decisions will be distorted, you are not perfect, you just waste your time focusing on the minutiae, so the performance is not more than normal working people. And in the end, you just get bored and tired.
Don't think of yourself as a business owner, but a startup. You're just doing what you love in your own way and getting paid for it. All you need is the idea, confidence and motivation to step onto the launch pad.
Chapter 3 – Going forward
Make a mark. To do great work, you need to see yourself making a difference, making a mark. Just have your customers say “this makes my life better”, or just if you stop what you are doing, people will recognize gay.
Scratch the itch. The easiest and fastest way to get a great product or service is to make something you want to use yourself. That is, simply where you itch, scratch there. The “solve your own problems” approach makes you love what you create and you will live with it, perhaps the rest of your life too.
Do you think your idea is worthwhile? Until you actually start creating something, your great idea is just an idea… The most important thing is to get started.
Don't blame the timing. You will always have enough time if you know how to use it properly. Just go to work as usual and take advantage of your plans in the evening. When you're really passionate about something, you make time for it, despite your other obligations. The perfect time never comes. If you keep gnawing at the perfect timing of everything, those things will never happen.
Stand up for. Successful businesses always have a point of view and they believe in it. Taking a strong stance is how you attract die-hard fans. They look out for you and protect you, and they will spread your word farther, wider and more passionately than any other form of advertising.
Raising capital from outside sources is the last resort. Regardless of the type of business you are in, use as little outside capital as possible. When you raise capital, someone else takes a stake in your company. Would you open a company to serve others? Again, investors always want to get their capital back as quickly as possible, what about your long-term projects? You will end up building what investors want instead of what customers want. Before putting your head in that noose, find another alternative.
You need less than you think. The issues of capital, personnel, facilities, and time actually need less than you think. Many companies started out in garages with just a few people, but then they became big companies.
Never think that your company is just starting up but you have to think that you are starting a real business, that is, you have to deal with real problems and have to think about profits right from the start. the first day. That way you will be more likely to succeed.
When you built a company with the intention of selling it, you took the wrong path. Does money alone really make you happy? How do you have enthusiasm and confidence? Never do. Happiness does not come twice. If you've built a potential business, keep it running.
If you don't need to scale up yet, keep it small, you can easily change anything: business model, product, feature, advertising message. You can make mistakes and quickly correct them. The important thing is that you can change your mindset.
Chapter 4 – Progress
Limited use. Time, money, manpower, experience, don't lament their limitations. Less is good. Restriction is an advantage that not everyone realizes. Work with what you have. There is no room for waste. That forces you to be creative. Before whining about lack, see what you can do with what you have.
You can't do everything you want and make it perfect. Let go of a few things for better results. Make great things by cutting the parts that are just mediocre.
Let's start with the epicenter. There are things you can do, things you want to do, and things you must do. What you have to do is where you should start. Let's start right at the epicenter.
Let's ignore the details at first. Focus on the basics first, and then worry about the details. The big picture is all you need to worry about before you start.
Stick to decision making. Don't wait for the perfect solution. Make a decision and move forward. Decision is progress. Ask “what can we do right now to get the best results?” Make a decision and start doing it as soon as you have enough momentum and motivation.
Be a supervisor making informed decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. Stick to what is quintessential. Trim it until only what really matters is left.
Core values never change. The core of your business should be built on the same things, the things that people want today and ten years from now they still want. Those are the things that you should invest in.
Use whatever you already have or what you can afford, just go ahead. Tools only play a "side role", the ability to make good use of what you have is the main thing. Remember that the tones are in your fingers.
When you make a product, you always create something to go with it. It is impossible to create just one thing. Anything has a by-product. Clever and creative business minds will target those by-products and see open opportunities.
You can get your product out much sooner than you think. Each of your products is fully featured, go to market.
Chapter 5 – Productivity
Question yourself. Reports, charts, descriptions take a long time to create, but after only a few seconds, they are forgotten. If you need to explain something, try to make it happen. Do whatever it takes to remove the abstract wrapper.
It's easy to work hard on what you think you should do, but it's much harder to stop and ask why you're doing it. You will find out what is really important by asking these questions: Why do you have to do this? What problem are you solving? Is this really helpful? Are you adding value? Does this change behavior? Is there an easier way? What can you do instead? Is it worth doing?
Ask yourself. Sometimes giving up on what you're working on is a bittersweet move. Don't keep wasting precious time on things that don't work.
Disruption: the enemy of productivity. You can make a rule at work that you will have half a day alone (or one day a week). A private place is the place where you put all your mind to work and at that time, your work productivity reaches its peak. Any disturbance forces you to start over. Resolutely fight and resist them.
Meetings are poison. Meetings often bring abstract concepts, side stories, meaningless statements, crammed with content without clear goals. An hour-long meeting is multiplied by the number of people attending, trading off a huge amount of productivity. The real cost of a meeting is too high!
If you decide that you definitely have to meet, then try to make the meeting effective: the audience is right, the problem, the solution, the task of each member is specific and focused.
Most problems have solutions. Why don't you look to the Judo solution, a solution that helps you get the most out of it with minimal effort? When it's just good enough to get you done, go for it. That's much wiser than wasting resources.
Victory speed. Growth energizes. The way to build momentum is to complete one thing and then move on to the next. Get in the habit of achieving small wins along the way, even a tiny improvement that generates good momentum.
Giving up is sometimes the best solution. People often equate giving up with failure, but sometimes that's exactly what you should do. If you've been spending too much time on something that's not right, give it up, if you keep wasting time on something you can't do, that's even worse.
Get enough sleep. Skipping sleep is a bad idea, because you'll pay a heavy price later: you'll choose "indiscriminately" solutions, you'll sabotage your creativity, lower your morale, become irritable, lose your patience and taste excuse.
Your estimates are wrong. We humans are bad at estimating. So break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller the thing, the easier it is to estimate. It is possible that you are still estimating wrong, but the deviation is much less than estimating a large project.
Big decisions are hard to make and hard to change. Especially when ego and pride prevail, you can't change your mind so easily. Make small choices so it's only temporary. When making small decisions, you can't make big mistakes, and you can change if it doesn't fit.
Chapter 6 – Competitors
Do not copy. When I was in school, imitation was a useful tool on the way to discovering one's own voice. But building a company by emulating an existing model is a recipe for failure. When simply "collage" you will have no understanding, not see the effort of the creator, it is buried deep beneath the mask. You will always be in a passive position, never taking the lead and will always follow others. Be influenced, but do not steal.
Product differentiation. If you succeed, people will copy what you do. To protect yourself from copycats, make yourself part of the product or service so that it becomes a product that no one else can.
Zappos has differentiated in customer service. Polyface differentiates itself by paying attention to the environment towards true quality.
Take a step back from the competition. Try to be one level behind the opponent, giving the difficult part to the opponent. Your product may just perform a simple feature, but it does it brilliantly. Highlight the features you have and be proud of it.
Competitors are not worth your attention. Focus on yourself, what's going on here is far more important than what's out there. You can't rule out your competition by offering a product that's just like them, a little better. So you let them make the rules and you can't beat the rule maker. You need to reset the rules: They are your last name and yours is yours.
Chapter 7 – Evolution
Firmly say no. Don't believe "the customer is always right". Get in the habit of saying "no". It's not worth pleasing a few complaining customers and ruining your product in the eyes of many. But don't say no silly. Be honest, explain why, convince them to think your way. Better to let customers happily use someone else's product, than force them to use your product out of displeasure.
Let your customers rise above you. When the company tries to customize the product according to the requirements to satisfy the existing customers, you lose the opportunity to acquire new customers. Let your customers rise above you. The number of people who are not using your product is always more than the number of people who are. Make sure you keep things simple, you can't fit everyone. Companies need to be loyal to certain types of customers.
You have lots of new ideas plus ideas from clients. Get excited about them but don't act on them right away. Let the ideas cool down, write them down, and prioritize them with a clear head.
Take it home and still use it. When customers buy a product that they feel very excited about in the store, but they are disappointed after taking it home to use. Don't use advertising and marketing to hide the bad experience your customers have had with your product.
Smart companies do the opposite: they create products that make customers happy to take home. The more they use it, the more they enjoy it. At that time, they themselves will share with friends about the product.
Chapter 8 – Promotion
Hide face. Currently no one knows who you are. That is very beneficial. Now you can experiment and if you make a mistake, no one will know. Let's continue to refine. Let's create highlights. Let's test random ideas. Try new things.
For this reason, retailers always test their products in pilot markets. When successful, the pressure to maintain stability, you become more conservative and more risk-averse because you are really scrutinized to every hairline.
Build an audience. All companies have customers ahgnf. Many companies are also fortunate to have fans. There are companies that have an audience. Your audience can be your secret weapon. Instead of you finding people with expensive advertising and marketing programs, you make people come to you. Your audience will find out for themselves what you have to offer. Share valuable information and you will surely build a loyal audience.
Share knowledge. Often companies can do advertising, sponsor events. To stand out from the competition, save money and be more efficient, you need to share more knowledge with your customers about what you know. Graphic design company that teaches web design. Nine Library TV Pub shares wine knowledge with customers… By doing so, you will form a bond with your customers. They will respect you more even those who have not used your product.
Get behind the scenes so everyone knows what you're doing. Because people like to discover everything even small business secrets. They are eager to tour your factory. When they know how much sweat, tears and effort you put into the product, they will understand and respect more what you are doing.
Sincerity. Don't be afraid to reveal your flaws. It is natural to have a defect and people tend to interact with what is natural. Remain poetic in what you do. When everything is too polished, it loses its soul and becomes rigid. Confront your weaknesses, you will be admired for your sincerity.
Try before you buy. Make your product so good that people want it at first use. Don't be afraid to give it away at first, so many industries can benefit from the trial-before-buy method. Be confident with what you have to offer.
Does your company have a marketing department? If not, fine. Marketing is something everyone does 24/7. Marketing isn't just a few single events, it's the sum total of everything you do.
Succeeding overnight is unthinkable. Do you often hear many success stories overnight? The truth is not so. They also had to "sweat, boiling tears" for many years to find a safe landing site. For those rare cases where success comes immediately, it usually doesn't last long because there is no foundation to support it.
Every time you have your clients, your business history, your audience, you'll chuckle to yourself when people talk about your success.
Chapter 9 – Hiring
Do it yourself first. Never hire someone to do anything you haven't tried yourself first. You will become a manager because you supervise people to do the things that you have done before. That saves you from groping in the dark and placing your destiny in someone else's hands, which is extremely dangerous.
The right time to hire is when you can't arrange and handle everything, the quality of the work drops, you can no longer do it. But when an employee leaves, don't fill the position right away. See how long you can last without him.
Don't hire someone you don't need, even if he's a rare talent. You will do more harm to the company than help if you hire a talented person that is not being used. You start creating jobs so people have things to do. Fake work leads to fake schemes that bring real costs and complexity.
Recruitment. We all know resumes are unreliable. If a person sends his resume to a bunch of companies at the same time, get rid of him. Because that candidate can't find out about you. For him, there is no difference between your company and other companies. Cover letters are a better checking tool than a resume. Trust your intuition, if your intuition tells you this is a potential candidate then move on to the interview stage.
Asking for experience is a good idea, but how to test how well they have done the job. The important thing is that the real difference comes from each individual's dedication, character and intelligence.
Know that the world of talented candidates is wide, not just limited to elite college graduates. Pay attention to other objects too. There are many people who are not excellent in academics, but are very intelligent. 90% of the CEOs of the top five hundred companies in the United States did not graduate from prestigious schools. There are skills that are useful in the classroom but are not applied in practice.
Hire a good manager. Good managers are people who have their own goals and know how to realize those goals. They don't need any guidance. Look at what they used to do. They control the situation at their old jobs. They run their own work or conduct a project on their own. Such people will help you a lot.
If you are considering among like-minded people. Choose the person who has the best writing skills. No matter what job or position they have, their writing skills will come into play. Writing skills are a sign of the ability to think logically. The ability to write today is the vehicle for great ideas.
Today, geographical distance is no longer an issue. Hire the best people, wherever they are.
Employee probation. You need to evaluate the work they can do now, not what they have done in the past. Hire them to do a small project with a short time, or different jobs related to the position they apply for, you will see if they are right for you.
Chapter 10 – Damage Control
Take control of the bad situation. When something bad happens, tell your customers, don't think you can hide it. Otherwise, rumors and misinformation will spread rapidly.
People will respect you more if you are open, honest, open, and accountable during a crisis.
In customer service, quickly communicating with customers is the most important thing. Every time you respond quickly, enthusiastically, carefully, show that you are listening, you have differentiated yourself from the competition, you can defuse an adverse situation and turn it into one. beneficial, customers will be happy and become extremely polite.
A true apology must include taking responsibility, a commitment not to let the incident happen again. Apologies seek ways to correct mistakes.
Put everyone at the front line. Listening to customers is the best way to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product. Let the people who directly make the product receive feedback from customers because the more intermediaries through, the more misleading information from customers. “The chef comes out to serve the table to consolidate the cooking.”
Calm mind. Every time you introduce a new feature change a policy or remove something. More or less a reaction will appear. But that doesn't mean you have to do what they want. Give things time to calm down, let them know you're listening. But don't be foolish to back down from a controversial but much-needed decision.
Chapter 11 – Culture
You don't create the culture. Culture is action, not exhortation. You don't create the culture, it creates itself. Culture is a by-product of consistent behavior: If you encourage people to share; If you value trust and treat your customers with dignity, then that sharing, trust and proper treatment will become part of your company's culture. You have to give it time to ferment properly.
The decision is only temporary. The ability to change direction is a small business advantage. Big companies can't move that fast. So you have to focus on the present first and worry about the future later. The decisions you make today are not necessarily permanent, they are only temporary.
Work environment. Instead of attracting talented people to your company, think about the working environment first. A great working environment shows respect to the people who are working, and will unlock their hidden talents. Because there are potentials stuck in stupid policies, wrong directions, stifling procedures waiting for opportunities to develop.
When you treat and treat people like children, you get children's results. What will you gain if you ban employees like this, that, you make rules, supervise but it has no effect, only creating a confrontational relationship between the employee and the boss.
Not trusting your employees will cause great losses. You don't have to work long hours, what you need is quality work hours. You shouldn't expect work to be someone's life, don't if you want to keep them at the company for the long term.
Regulations gradually entered the companies and gradually formed the policy. Every policy is a scar. Don't make a scar on the first cut; Don't create a policy by the mistake of someone who just made the first mistake. Policies only make sense in repetitive situations.
Words with four letters. There are four letter words that you shouldn't use in business. These words, when inserted in the midst of healthy communication, become a warning to break up the negotiation; creating a difficult situation to distinguish black and white. They are: need, must, can't, easy, just, only and fast. You should also be careful with words that are related to these words: everyone (everyone), no one (nobody), always (always) and never (never).
The phrase “as soon as possible” implies that everything comes first; That way, nothing is a priority. This type of agitation only creates tension, causes burnout, and even leads to bad consequences.
Chapter 12 – The End
We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal, they are eternal. What doesn't last forever is inspiration, it's like freshly picked fruit that has an expiration date.
If you want to do something, you have to do it right away, if you wait, you will lose interest.
Inspiration is a miracle, a productivity booster, a source of motivation, it doesn't wait for you, it's instantaneous. If it appears, grasp it immediately.
