REWORK is a very interesting book about the modern working lifestyle. It is written by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson and a New York Times bestseller. The company behind this book is 37signals.com which is widely known as Basecamp. It is project management software that I used to use in the past, and it is famous for its simplicity and usefulness.
In this 270 pages book, you can explore modern approaches about universal problems & challenges that most of the software companies have. All of its chapters are short & easily readable while the essence overall is that they truly believe what they write and they do not want to create another mediocre book full of common theories and buzzwords. One more plus is that it covers a big variety of topics such as Marketing, competition, business culture, hiring, productivity etc.
Ignore this book at your peril
Seth Godin
Book Highlights
Workaholism
One of the chapters that I really liked was talking about workaholism. Nowadays, the business world promotes & highlights stories of people that “made it” by working all day long or people that “hustling” hard day and night in order to build their business empire. Even though I consider myself as workaholic too, I can’t ignore REWORK‘s different approach in workaholism and all the problems that it potentially creates. Moreover, I personally believe that there are people that camouflage their inability to provide valuable deliverables within an 8-hours schedule into a fake workaholic profile.
Marketing
Another interesting point in this book is that writers seem to truly understand the nature of Marketing. Marketing is not a department, it is the sum total of everything you do. All the examples they provide are “marketing” related even though they belong to other business departments. EVERYTHING is Marketing. I can provide a list of arguments about it, but if you need the list in order to be persuaded then you do not believe in that at all.
Speed
Last but not least, they are talking about speed. But they are talking about the real speed and all the consequences and advantages you will face and harness respectively if you embrace this specific mindset. I don’t know any company in the world that would consider itself as “slow” but for example, being fast enough while avoiding using the word “asap” is not easy. This mindset requires high levels of alignment between people and self-accountability (since it will not help you create 100% perfect solutions) that not many businesses or professionals are willing to embrace.
Summary
To sum up, this book provides value to every professional that is working in the digital business landscape, regardless of expertise or profession and he is interested in adopting a modern way of thinking that will change the way he works forever. I personally, read it when I was entering into digital marketing and it helped me drastically to set my working principles. To give you an example, I started to hate meetings before I have my first ones 🙂
You can buy this book directly from Book Depository by clicking on this link (free shipping)
