Crazy At Work
Basecamp is a calm company, not a crazy company.
It’s a company that makes project management software. It’s more than 20 years old, and has been profitable since day one, it serves millions of customers and has just 56 employees.
It’s profitability helps it stay calm instead of running after crazy funding rounds from overbearing investors.
It’s the antithesis of a Startup, it’s a Stay Up.
The founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson don’t invest in any sort of marketing of their product, instead they write a wildly popular blog called Signal Vs Noise, and from time to time they publish books that reveal their secret sauce and their organisation philosophy.
“It Doesn’t have to be crazy at work” is their latest book. In the book they brilliantly take on the “80-hour week, growth for growth’s sake” corporate culture we see everywhere around us.
It’s said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, and this book is all about building the culture of a company.
They begin with the idea that your company is a product. It’s a product that you sell to your employees. Once you start to look at a company like that, you start to see how and where it can improve. It’s somehow not set in stone anymore, it’s a lot more fluid and you can change it.
It’s a liberating idea.
The book is filled with countless such fascinating insights, it’s a light read that you can finish in a couple of days.
You are the average of the 5 types of content you consume most online.
Subscribe to The Wisdom Project to receive a curation of the best that the internet has to offer.
We send 1 Email every Sunday.
