Ecommerce company FastPivot.com confronts day to day challenges in the virtual office space that are often unknown to those operating within the bricks-and-mortar corporate world. Within our virtual framework exists a special sub-culture that requires a special attention to the way we work and communicate. As we strive to excel, we have found many useful tools that assist with our professional development; one exercise we use for team development is reading and discussing top-rated business books, relevant to our field. “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Hansson is one such book FastPivot employees recently picked up, read and discussed.
“Rework” lessons & tips FastPivot team members found most valuable:
- I especially like what the book had to say about building corporate culture, and how to run an ‘agile’ style business. It is really about communication, doing what you say, and taking responsibility for your action steps.¬† It was well worth the read, and it actually made me read “Getting Real” about developing web apps.
- I’m amazed how accurately it pinpoints exactly what happens in the workplace that causes projects to be bogged down.
- In light of the “Rework” book and the chapter titled “Get it out there,” We are keeping in mind that “Once the product does what it needs to do, we are getting it out there. And instead of it being a “perfect product” we have “built the necessities now and will worry about the luxuries later.”
- Better to have a “Kickass Half instead of a Half-ass whole.”
Our favorite chapters include:
- “Launch Now” – see pg. 93 – don’t wait for things to be perfect, get it out now for the world to see and make edits/changes along the way. The longer you wait, the more the news is going to be old and outdated. FastPivot moves FAST…we are pioneers and this is a great chapter to remind us of that.
- “Marketing is Not a Department” – see pg. 193 – everyone is a marketer — remember to put your best foot forward always, wherever you are at b/c people are noticing you and will associate you with where you work. Marketing is everything that we do in an organization and it bleeds into all facets of the workplace.
- “Meetings are Toxic” – see pg. 109 – meetings that are vague and not to the point are really a waste of people’s time. People don’t pay attention and multi-task if they don’t have to be engaged in the meeting. Make sure people are involved and if they don’t need to be in the meeting, don’t have them there. Just b/c you have always had the same meeting every week, doesn’t mean that it should continue that way – look at your meetings to make sure they are necessary and that action items are being taken away from them. End with solutions!
There were so many great take-aways from “Re-Work” that it’s difficult to list them all, but the bottom line for a company like FastPivot is learning to work smarter, not necessarily harder.
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