Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever
Crown Business (US) / Vermilion (UK), 2010
Rework is a short, punchy business manifesto written by the founders of the Chicago software company, 37signals. It’s the kind of book you can breeze through in an afternoon, which is perhaps one reason why it climbed the New York Times bestseller list earlier this year.
Another reason, no doubt, is the book’s simplicity. The authors set out to make a few dozen points – lessons learned while building a company over the last decade. Like with many other popular business books, some of the points will border on truism (“Embrace constraints”, “Meetings are toxic”) for the Generation X and Y reader.
Luckily, however, most points laid out in Rework are provocative – not the kind of things you’ll usually find on hardcover dust jackets in the business section; things like “Emulate drug dealers” “Learning from mistakes is overrated;” and “Good enough is fine.”