Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Book Review: Rework

Published by Taylor on March 23, 2010 in Book Reviews, Books, Business, Careers, Culture, Entrepreneurship and Productivity. View Comments

The dream employee for a lot of companies is a twenty-something with as little of a life as possible outside of work–someone who’ll be fine working fourteen-hour days and sleeping under his desk.  But packing a room full of these burn-the-midnight-oil types isn’t as great as it seems. [. . .]  You don’t need more hours; you need better hours.  When people have something to do at home, they get down to business.  They get their work done because they have somewhere else to be.  They find ways to be more efficient because they have to.

-Rework (affiliate link)

The 37 Signals team behind the project management software I and thousands of others use daily (Basecamp) published a new book laying out some of the principles behind their success.  They call Rework a “by product” of their business; the equivalent of a cookbook written by a chef confident enough that their mastery will still trump any upstart competitors armed with detailed instructions.  One of the ideas promoted in Rework, after all, is to strengthen and promote your business by teaching–customers, other business owners, even competitors:

[E]mulate famous chefs.  They cook, so they write cookbooks.  What do you do?  What are your “recipes”?  What’s your “cookbook”?  What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?  This book is our cookbook.

And it’s full of direct, combative, written-with-purpose recipes for running an un-apologetically small but thriving business.  The book is organized into a series of brief essays on a variety of work topics; read on for a few passages I found particularly compelling and a special video dialogue where Jarred and I discuss the book:

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FitBit: Bringing The Prius Effect to Personal Fitness

Published by Jarred on March 22, 2010 in Gadgets and Health. View Comments

In September 2008, TechCrunch held its second annual TechCrunch50 event.  The multi-day conference brings together early-stage startups to give demos of their products in front of a panel of tech investors and consultants.  As I browsed through TechCrunch’s coverage of the event, one demo caught my eye in particular: the FitBit.  I put the $99 device on my Christmas 2008 wish list, but production and shipment was delayed by almost a year and a half because of design issues.  I just received my unit last month.

FitBit was a rare TechCrunch 50 demo in that it actually conceived a product made out  bits and atoms.  The company produces an extremely compact device called the FitBit Tracker.  About the length of a match and the thickness of a pack of gum, the Tracker is little more than an accelerometer coupled with a Bluetooth antenna, a bit of memory, and an LED display.  In other words, it’s a tricked out, wi-fi enabled pedometer.

But the value of FitBit lies not so much in the gadget itself as as in the data mining it enables.  The driving concept is unofficially called “the Prius effect,” the idea that people will behave differently (better, hopefully) when they have more granular visibility into their behavior.  For the Prius, it’s the in-dash monitor that shows how much gas is being saved by the hybrid system.  For Google Powermeter, it’s the hour-by-hour online graph of home power consumption.  When you can track your pace and realize the stakes, the competition you hold with yourself to become better grows fiercer.

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“It’s Always Been My Dream to Own a Joyless Moneypit”

Published by Taylor on March 18, 2010 in Business, Careers and Entrepreneurship. View Comments

As Ezra Klein neatly summarizes in his link to this story (an old link, but worth revisiting), “Opening a coffee shop is really hard.”  And yet, be honest: some part of you has imagined doing it.

I’m intrigued by the types of businesses that are so romantically attractive to would-be entrepreneurs (yours truly), midlife crisis corporate types, and ambitious retirees…despite being nearly impossible to launch successfully.  From the Slate story Ezra references about a nice couple who decided to chase their dream and open a coffee shop:

The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one’s own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they’re going to lose a lot of it.

[...] Guess what, dear dreamers? The psychological gap between working in a cafe because it’s fun and romantic and doing the exact same thing because you have to is enormous. Within weeks, [my wife] and I—previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage—were at each other’s throats. [...] Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves—or, as we saw it, each other—on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee.

The restaurant business can be worse.  Here’s one industry veteran’s warning to day-dreamers:

I had somebody approach me who had a very good job with a major company and an MBA from a prestigious university [and wanted to open a restaurant]. I looked at him and asked, “Is your career in danger?” He said, “No, but I’ve always loved food. I love to cook. I love to have parties.” I told him to invite 20 friends over, throw a great dinner party, and then take a stack of $100 bills and burn them one by one. It will be fun—and cheaper than opening a restaurant.

It’s easy to confuse the types of establishments we like to frequent with the types of enterprises we’d like to run.  Coffee shops embody a tremendous mythology based on the notion that since it’s so relaxing and fun to be a coffee shop patron it must similarly be painless and joyous to create that space for others.  Unfortunately, customers people can be unreasonable, stingy, fickle, and downright unpleasant when they’re low on caffeine or faced with a slightly-stale scone.

Almost any business can seem more glamorous and, frankly, easy to manage from the outside.  The trick is understanding enough about the good, the bad, and the ugly reality before jumping into a new industry or setting out on your own…while maintaining enough of that naivete and idealism to succeed, even in impossibly difficult endeavors.  No one dreams of owning a joyless moneypit that serves coffee or Italian food.  But the great coffee shops and Italian eateries are run by people who knew the risks and decided to give it a shot anyway.

Image of a presumably very happy and well-run coffee shop used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user pellesten.

Keeping It All In Perspective

Published by Jarred on March 13, 2010 in Tropophilia and Twitter. View Comments

One of my favorite people that I follow on Twitter is Genevieve Spencer.  Her tweets are extremely brief, and she writes pretty much exclusively about her day to day life.  Sometimes she just comments on the weather (“Snowed a little bit today”), other times she talks about school (“Played “I Spy” at school to-day. Teacher was late. I was the first one there.).  She never comments on current events or responds to other people’s tweets.

That’s because she’s dead.

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