Summary of It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work Book by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

It begins with this idea: Your company is a product.

Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That’s why your company should be your best product.

Everything in this book revolves around that idea. That, like product development, progress is achieved through iteration. If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.

But when it comes to companies, many stand still. They might change what they make, but how they make it stays the same. They choose a way to work once and stick with it. Whatever workplace fad is hot when they get started becomes ingrained and permanent. Policies are set in cement. Companies get stuck with themselves.

But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What’s fast about it? What’s slow about it? Are there bugs? What’s broken that we can fix quickly and what’s going to take a long time?

A company is like software. It has to be usable; it has to be useful. And it probably also has bugs, places where the company crashes because of bad organizational design or cultural oversights.

When you start to think about your company as a product, all sorts of new possibilities for improvement emerge. When you realize the way you work is malleable, you can start molding something new, something better.

Running a calm company is, unfortunately, not the default way to run a company these days. You have to work against your instincts for a while. You have to put toxic industry norms aside. You have to recognize that “It’s crazy at work” isn’t right.

Basecamp is a destination, Jason Fried and David Hansson shares how they got there and stay there. Basecamp is a product. And the authors want you to think of yours as one, too. Whether you own it, run it, or “just” work there, it takes everyone involved to make it better.

Basecamp is a software company, that is supposed to be playing the hustle game in Silicon Valley, but does not have a single employee in the Valley. In fact, the company staff of 54 is spread out across about 30 different cities around the world.

The staff put in about 40 hours a week most of the year and just 32 in the summer. The company send people on month – long sabbaticals every three years. It does not only pay for people’s vacation time, it pays for the actual vacation, too.

No, not 9 p.m. Wednesday night. It can wait until 9 a.m. Thursday morning. No, not Sunday. Monday.

Are there occasionally stressful moments? Sure — such is life. Is every day peachy? Of course not. But the company does it’s best to make sure those are the exceptions. On balance, the company is calm — by choice, by practice.