MANAGEMENT books have a deservedly poor reputation. Too often they are written by people who confuse insight with jargon, the types who love to call a spade a “manual horticultural utensil”. At the other end of the scale are tomes containing a plethora of pithy platitudes about “breaking the mould” and “worshipping the kill”. The choice, in short, is between the incomprehensible and the inconsequential.
So it was a joy for Bartleby to read “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work”, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, who run a software company in Chicago called Basecamp. Their book is funny, well-written and iconoclastic and by far the best thing on management published this year.
The authors argue that it is perfectly possible to run a business with consistently growing profits (as they do) without requiring employees to work madly long hours. Tired workers will not be productive since “creativity, progress and impact do not yield to brute force”. Sleep-deprived managers are likely to be counterproductively impatient.
Basecamp employees have a 40-hour week, except in the summer when the company runs a four-day, 32-hour week. They also get three weeks’ holiday every year (subsidised by the firm to the tune of $5,000 per person), a month-long sabbatical every three years, and a monthly massage at a spa.
Those are the right sort of perks, say Messrs Fried and Heinemeier Hansson. The wrong kind, found in many offices, include free dinners, games rooms and snack bars, which are all devices to keep employees at the office for longer. Workers should also beware of companies that declare “we’re all family here”—a ruse to get workers to put their employers ahead of the needs of their real families.
Another criticism of corporate culture levelled by the book is that offices have become interruption factories. People are working longer and later because they cannot get stuff done at the office any more. At a conference attended by 600 people, the authors asked how many had recently enjoyed 3-4 hours of uninterrupted work; only 30 hands went up.
Source: The Economist
Adapted from http://www.kekenet.com/menu/201810/568231.shtml