For all us fans of Basecamp, there is good news.
The company which gave us Getting Real, Rework, and Remote is coming up with a new book. It’s called ‘The Calm Company’.
Jason Fried, the Founder & CEO of Basecamp, has posted an excerpt of the book on Signal v. Noise, and as expected, it’s about work and work culture, as practiced by Basecamp.
It’s time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more artificial targets set by ego, not need. It’s time to stop celebrating crazy.
Over the last 17 years we’ve been working at making Basecamp a calm company. One that isn’t fueled by stress, or ASAP, or rushing, or late nights, or all-nighter crunches, or impossible promises, or high turnover, or over-collaboration, or consistently missed deadlines, or projects that never seem to end, or manufactured busywork, or incorrect assumptions that lead to systemic institutional anxiety.
No growth-at-all-costs. No constant, churning false busyness. No ego-driven decisions. No keeping up with the Joneses Corporation. No hair on fire.
And yet we’ve been profitable 68 straight quarters, 17 straight years. We’ve kept our company intentionally small — we believe small is a key to calm.
If you are a passionate reader of SVN, you would find most of this repetitive, but David Heinemeier Hansson, Founder & CTO at Basecamp assures that, the book also includes “plenty of new topics or new takes or new angles.”
