I recently read Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Rework” while on a four-hour flight. Hands-down, it’s simply the best business book I’ve read in years. For one, it’s actually readable and entertaining. Even if I wasn’t trapped on a plane, it’s still a book I’d have consumed just as quickly.
Chock full of nuggets of business wisdom, disguised in part as common sense, it’s one of those books I wish I wrote myself. Some of its best insights follow below, in bold, along with my take on them.
Ignore the real world. Today, more than ever, we need to look beyond current solutions. The world of advertising is undergoing rapid change, and there are few who understand the need to rethink everything we know about marketing. The customer is king, among other shifting tides. Geo-location apps may be all the rage, but it’s what we do with that information that determines their utility for marketers, and the subsequent benefit for users.
Why grow? Size is irrelevant to success. Many would argue it could be an impediment to success in this era of ubiquitous technology-enabled channels for communication where customers can both air grievances or start positive dialogues about their interactions with products and brands. We should waste no time in learning from their experiences and opinions, and put said learning into action to make improvements. Smaller, nimbler agencies and businesses may even have the advantage here.
Be a starter. It’s no longer about entrepreneurship as we’ve known it to be. Anyone and everyone can be a starter. Content creators and curators are among the new small business owners. For traditional (read: big) business and agencies, this should be a good thing in sparking new innovations and dismantling useless, expensive infrastructures and processes where they’re no longer needed.
Start. Ideas are only as valuable as their implementation. Doing trumps strategizing. Execution can be said to be not only everything, these days, it can be the only thing. Scrap the 3-year, or even 12-month plans in favor of dynamic road maps that can shift direction with new customer insights and market challenges.
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