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Both their books are quick reads and worth the couple hours you would invest. That said, you likely aren't going to come away from either with a profound new understanding of anything. You could wrap both up into a couple bullet points. Keep things simple. It will save you time, money and make your customers happier. Work within and embrace your ...

I file everything by 37signals under the "potentially quite helpful, but take it with a handful of salt" category, the same place I put Seth Godin. At times they have some really lucid and sensible insights but a lot of the time their cocky attitudes make their thoughts unpalatable. You'll take the bad with the good, but are their books worth reading? ...

I will be a contrarian here and tell you that 37Signals may be a great company, but their product is only fit for either extremely unstructured companies or those under 5 employees. As we have gone past 5 employees, we could not wait to get the heck out of every one of their tools we were using. And it was an absolute hell to move from so loosey goosey done ...

It would be cliche to say Rework "changed the way I think about sitting down at my desk to bang out projects"... but it kinda did. You can go back and read the lessons any time (they are only 1-2 pages). They are terse, which might put some people off who like long winded explanations, but effective. And last but not least it leaves you with the ...

What I think of ReWork? Here are some comments taken from HN (following this review by Management Today): 1) I'm currently reading the book, and he amusingly left out the stats supporting their conclusions or the rest of the sentence which tempers the strong advice. This is obviously intentional. They say "Don't make plans" and end ...

I'll admit that I've never got Basecamp. I've used it a few times, and always been surprised by how scrawny it is - no half decent search, zero usable process support and no sensible way of integrating other tools that fill the gaps. I like a lot about the 37signals stance in general, but this is a tool that survives (in my view) on reputation alone. It was ...

I use basecamp with two of my suppliers. The fundamental difference between basecamp and google apps is that basecamp is built for collaboration only, and it's useful for exchanging files. It works well for a limited amount of tasks: ToDo lists; discussion threads, uploading and commenting on files. I use it to share out wireframes, exchange files with ...

Basecamp and other 37signals tools are really great. Though, in distributed teams you have to remember that just tools would not do all the work. You have to make sure that communication is good, team members know and understand each other well. For that, I suggest to use tools like Skype and Yammer to build up your communcation channels between the members. ...

I personally think they are well written books, with great advice for entrepreneurs. Different things work for different people. It always pays to listen to and understand the perspective of bright people. I personally believe, different styles of management are needed when things are going well and when things are going awry. I also believe that a lot ...

Not sure where the disdain for 37signals comes from as my team uses Basecamp and Highrise every day. I've tried MS Project and amalgamations of several others, but nothing is as clean and easy to use as Basecamp. As for a CRM, Highrise gets my vote, hands down. I'd been a paying customer of Salesforce and I've tried Sugar. Zolo even has one I think I've ...

We have a distributed team with 9 people. I find some of the other comments mystifying about how you can't use 37signals beyond 5 people or with distributed teams. After all, 37signals itself has 20-some people and a distributed workforce. I am also mystified that someone would assert that an industry leader like 37signals is "surviving" on reputation alone. ...