People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis. Don’t hide behind spin or try to keep your bad news on the down low. You.
As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”fn3.
Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work – not the clock – that matters.
Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.
A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.
Respect the work that you’ve never done before.
WE ALL HAVE ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date.
Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.
All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences.
Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.
Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
Problems can usually be solved with simple, mundane solutions. That means there’s no glamorous work. You don’t get to show off your amazing skills. You just build something that gets the job done and then move on. This approach may not earn you oohs and aahs, but it lets you get on with it.
Walk into a library anywhere in the world and you’ll notice the same thing: It’s quiet and calm. Everyone knows how to behave in a library. In fact, few things transcend cultures like library behavior. It’s a place where people go to read, think, study, focus, and work. And the hushed, respectful environment reflects that. Isn’t that what an office should be?
What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention – they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.
If the only way you can inspire the troops is by a regimen of exhaustion, it’s time to look for some deeper substance. Because what trickles down is less likely to be admiration but dread and fear instead. A leader who sets an example of self-sacrifice can’t help but ask self-sacrifice of others.
Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people.
It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.
You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse.
When someone wants to demonstrate a new feature they’re working on at 37signals, often the easiest way is to record a screencast and narrate the experience. A screencast is basically just a recording of your screen that others can play back later as a movie. It can be used in several ways, including for presenting the latest sales figures or elaborating on a new marketing strategy.