Below are comments from Jason Fried, CEO of 37 signals (side note: Jason was a great presenter who stirred up the audience)
Small is good.
There is a tendancy to build more software, but software gets in the way most of the time.
37signals' products do less than competitors on purpose.
These views are unonventional and viewed by some as backwards, reckless, unprofessional, etc. That's fine.
Main ideas
Team size - keep them small
Team location - keep them apart
Team meetings - less of them
Decisions - make them tiny
Keep teams small-
Large teams inherently try to do too much. What you really want is simple solutions. Do simple beautiful.
Small teams mean less control, and by default you get clearer communication
Collaboration is about communication, not control
Keep your team apart-
You get more work done
Interruption is not collaboration. It puls people out of their zone. The idea of being able to get to anyone, anytime is bad
You need to encourage alone time.
The analogy is with R.E.M. sleep. We need R.E.M. work
No one WORKS 8 hours, but we need to maximize the amount of productive time
Good collaborative software is good because it is passive.
Meetings
Meetings are toxic because they are symptoms, not solutions
Meetings should be a last resort
- they break up your work day into small, incoherent disruptions
- usually meetings are about words and abstract concepts, not real things. It creates an illusion of agreement
Meetings convey an abysmally samll amount of information per minute
Meetings require preparation that people rarely do anyway
So how do we avoid meetings?
Make tiny decisions
When you make tiny decisions all the time, you can't make big mistakes.
The traditional operation method of taking time and wrestling over everything creates too much inertia
Other thoughts-
Over-collaboration is not a good thing
People like to see stuff that is real. Cut back on meeting time and instead show real stuff or provide more passsive interaction.
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