On the theme of new management rules and how the Fortune article reminded me of talks by Jason Fried (see my last post), I thought it would only be appropriate that this week’s QOTW come from two of Fried’s previous presentations.Just look below at some of what he has to say about the 37signals style of doing business and compare these with the “new rules” column in the Fortune article and I’m sure you’ll see some pretty clear similarities right away.  Firstly, a 13 min presentation, called “Less is More,” from the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Here’s the first few minutes of his talk intro:

So what I want to talk about today is this idea of “less.” And specifically, this idea of less as a competitive advantage. Traditionally, people think of less as a bad thing. They think they have to do more. So they have a competitor and they think they have to outdo the competitor. If the competitor has 5 features, they need to build 6. If the competitor is spending 30 million, they need to spend 50 million. They need to keep outdoing people.

And while I think that system may work, I don’t really think it’s the best way of doing things anymore. It’s painful; it’s expensive; takes a long time; takes a lot of resources. It’s a very cold war mentality way of doing things, trying to one-up everybody. So what I would suggest is that people start thinking about “one-downing” people. And, not out-doing, but “under-doing” people. Under-doing your competitors. Beating them with less is really the way to move forward, I think, in this new era of light-weight apps and simple products. So what I want to talk about are five specific things that you actually need less of; that you probably think you need more of…

Fried then goes on to elaborate on the following five topics:

1. Less Money
2. Less People
3. Less Time
4. Less Abstractions
5. Less Software

Check out the rest of the talk here.

Along the same notion and almost as a follow up to the above, the following is taken from Fried’s 15 min interview on the Business Jive podcast, which I thought was quite fitting in terms of the “new rules” of management. Specifically, the statement below refers to “Functional Specifications Document” (a.k.a. Functional Requirements Document) and his dislike for them;
but more than that, I think it really feeds into the “old vs. new” way of thinking …

You can’t make decisions about things when you don’t have a lot of information and the time you don’t have a lot of information, is the time when you get started—that’s the point when you have the least amount of information about something. As you begin building something, you have more and more information about it. What’s going to work? What isn’t going to work? What the costs are. Does this make sense? What doesn’t make sense? Over the years I’ve just realized that trying to make all these decisions up front, doesn’t make any sense at all…To say that you know everything on day one; you’re lying to yourself. A whole bunch of things change over three or six months, so if you’re stuck to this old way of doing things and this old plan, and the future is based on these things that you did in the past, then you’re just lying to yourself, you’re cheating your clients, and you’re cheating your customers.