Rework is a book written by the founders of 37 Signals. In case you are not familiar with their work they are the people behind Ruby on Rails, an open source framework. The book takes a fresh look at how to run your own business and I have to say that I agreed with every point that they make.

The book is not like a conventional book. Although there are chapters each chapter is itself broken down into sections that are no more than a couple of pages in length and each subsection makes a key point. This means that if you only have a couple of minutes you can still read a section or two and then put the book down again having gained some knowledge.

During my working life I have worked for both large and small organisations, both have their advantages and disadvantages. Small businesses can usually react more qauickly to changing circumstances while large organisations are more like trying to steer a super-tanker. The plus side for large organisations is that in an economic downturn such as we are experiencing at the moment they have “more fat” with which to survive the harsh conditions than a small firm.

I digress, back to “Rework”. Fried and Hansson have put into plain words what most of us have probably thought at one time or another. You can open this book at just about any page and find a little nugget of wisdom, want an example? Here goes…

“If you’re constantly staying late or working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to do. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.”

Sound familiar? I bet it does. Fried and Hansson suggest that among other things:

• What you do is what matters, not what you say or think
• Make decisions and move forward
• Get enough sleep
• Press releases are spam, tailor your response to the individual
• C.V.’s are worthless, the covering letter is more important
• Don’t make knee jerk reactions to resistance to change

But the best section of the book for me is the section “Meetings are Toxic”. I have sat in many meetings where items of the agenda feel like tennis balls being batted about the table until everybody has had their say, usually repeating what somebody else has already said. Then the item is carried over to the next meeting when a repeat performance is executed. As Fried and Hansson point out it is not just the time that you are in the meeting that is lost but also the 15 minutes either side of the meeting where you are not working at your maximum efficiency.

If we all worked in the way that Fried and Hansson suggest then I think many organisations would be a lot more profitable.

Fried & Hansson may sound a little revolutionary in some of the things that they say in this book, but in reality it is all just common sense. Sadly, as my father always said, there’s nothing common about sense!