I recently finished listening to the Audible recording for Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier. [Baduku Review] and I have to admit I enjoyed it thoroughly. This doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with it completely but the convincing tone and the unwavering commitment to their dogma comes off as something definitive, as if it’s the only way to do business. Here I’ll make some arguments about why you should read it but don’t drink the kool-aid just yet.

It reminded me of the absolute power that Al Reis’s  22 Immutable Laws of Marketing or Branding had over the way I approached marketing and branding. There were countless times in brand strategy meeting when people would reference a quote from that book as if it were the unquestionable final word.

For example, every time a client suggested a developing a new product completely outside the realm of their expertise, some one would toss out a Reis quote like “The law of elasticity” arguing that brand doesn’t have the elasticity to have the market accept this new product so Don’t Do It! However, after a decade of branding, not only have I come to realize that not only shouldn’t we be so dogmatic about branding, relying only on one perspective, but some real world case studies have come to completely defy some of these so call “immutable” laws, clearly some things are and must be mutable. As we see now brands like Google have expanded into multiple realms of products such as mobile phones which clearly defy the law of elasticity.

That being said the “immutable law” are really more like “common safe suggestions” but if you want to be really successful you may have to make some command decisions based on the situation at hand. Fried and Heinemeier’s Rework kind of has this feel where I think people are going to take it so literally that become their own personal dogma. Not to say that some ideas are brilliant, I just don’t think it is the be-all end-all solution to take any and every business from basement to billions.

This kind of complete commitment to the dogma was even more evident when I watch Jason Calacanis’ interview with David Heinemeier on the This Week in Startups Web Show [Baduku Review]. The two seemed to butt heads over so many issues, for example the topic of defining the perfect employees. Calacanis was a strong believer in employees who burn the midnight oil, site examples of the work environments at Apple and his own company, Maholo. However, Heinemeier who referenced the Rework school of thought, argued that employees who burn the midnight oil are a sign of inefficient employees.

I don’t want to be be burning the midnight oil all the time, but I do, because I have to. I do it because it’s an investment in today so that I might have to do it many years from now in the future. Burning the midnight oil I think is fine if people feel they are getting what they deserve for it. This is one of many reasons why I don’t work at a 9 to 5 job, because I want the option of working 5 – 10 if it means I can get to a better place faster.

What is the upward mobility of working as a filing clerk at a mortgage firm as opposed to a job where you define your own position and goals and you work hard to make it viable. This is a statement I’ve made time and time again to young adults entering the work place, create demand for a position and fill it.

I recount to them the story of my experience at Linksys. When I first started there I began as a Technical Support Representative, answering phones. One of the duties of a Tech Support Rep was to spend 1 hour a day testing out RMA product to see if it worked, mostly NICs (Network Interface Cards). It was a process where I had to boot up the card on 4 different operating systems, Windows, Windows NT, Linux and Novell. The 9 – 5ers would do their part, spend that 1 hour doing as they were told and testing cards individually on each different machine.

I saw an inefficiency here and thought why, can’t we automate this and create a batch operation that tested these three card one after another on the same system without having unplug the card and move it. With a bit of tinkering late at night at the office after everyone had left, I was able to create this automated RMA system so now instead of 1 NIC being processed very 5 minutes it was 4 card being processed in 3 minutes.

To make a long story short, the President of Linksys at the time, Victor Tsao, saw what I had did and from that created a new position that allowed me to train all support staff on how to use my new process and Victor then asked me to seek out other inefficiencies. That lead to my implementation of screenshots into the users guides of every product, not only a Linksys first but competitors would soon follow the same lead. All in all i kept creating new positions until I was Product Manager in less than 1 year. The thing to remember here is that burning the midnight oil is a great opportunity that some people want and crave and we should always make that opportunity available to them along with the appropriate reward and recognition.

There was certainly plenty of banter about the company size, particularly the number of people it takes to make a company successful. The Rework school of thought favors small teams, and Heinemeier argued that he thinks a successful multi-million dollar company could be eternally successful with as little as one person, however, Calacanis disagreed and stated that perhaps he didn’t understand the sheer complexity of scalability that companies like twitter face, which demand more people and rapid expansion. Perhaps Heinemeier most shocking comment was that he believed that he could run Twitter with half the people. I personally feel that keeping a company small for as long as you can is a good thing but the operative word really is “as long as you can”. At some point you have to start looking for other people to delegate your work to so that you can start concentrating on more important things. I personally don’t think Zappos could be a billion dollar company if Tony Hsieh had to fulfill every order on his own by hand. It all comes down to momentum. Business that utilize the Rework school of thought don’t really have growth momentum, they have organized methodical growth blocks, while other companies who are growing disproportionately, ie more and more demand but not as much income growth have a momentum that they just can’t stop, or if they do stop it could very well mean the end of their business.

I think over all they both made valid points. It’s the same reason why when I handed a copy of Rework to my friend,  I pretty much warned him the same thing. I said, “When you read this you need to keep in mind that you shouldn’t take everything as fact or as the only way of doing things, even though the tone make you feel like you should. Just remember that 37 Signals is a company of only a few employees spread across an entire nation, and they have a product that they can sell with a subscription to a small niche group of people.” The take away here is that some idea and concept seem to make great valid points but we shouldn’t take them as law. It really all depends on the situation at hand and whether the concept seems viable to this particular scenario.