Fire and Knowledge

David Heinemeier at 37 Signals says to fire the workaholics. Choice quote:

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

This is in response to Jason Calacanis’s fairly good advice on how to save money running a startup, where he said to fire people who are not workaholics.

I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

–Thomas Jefferson, U. S. President (1801–1809), as quoted in Richard Templar, The Rules of Management (Prentice Hall, 2005), p. 112.

It is amazing how much you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

–Harry Truman, U. S. President (1945-53), as quoted in Richard Templar, The Rules of Management (Prentice Hall, 2005), p. 35.

The ideas that come out of most brainstorming sessions are usually superficial, trivial, and not very original. They are rarely useful. The process, however, seems to make uncreative people feel that they are making innovative contributions and that others are listening to them.

–A. Harvey Block, CEO, Bokenon Systems, as quoted in Richard Templar, The Rules of Management (Prentice Hall, 2005), p. 11.

Openness emerges when two or more individuals become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence. They become willing to share their thinking and are susceptible to having their thinking influenced by one another. And … in a state of openness, they gain access to depths of understanding not accessible otherwise.

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), p. 284.

Factory automation and labor-saving appliances were supposed to have all but eliminated the need to work. Yet in the past twenty years there has been an increase in the average number of hours worked in North America. Increased productivity was supposed to create universal affluence, to eliminate poverty as we know it. Yet despite the fact that GDP in Canada has doubled since the ‘70s, the level of “basic needs” poverty has remained unchanged. And what about those flying Jetson cars, or at least clean high-speed trains? Commuting has become a nightmare for most city-dwellers. And far from being clean, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles in North America has dropped.

Who could seriously have predicted, thirty years ago, that this is how things would play out? How is it that we can produce so much more wealth and yet fail to secure any measurable improvement in satisfaction?

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), pp. 100-1

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity there ain’t nothing can beat teamwork.”

–Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), p. 368

Reading speed increases to the extent that you reduce the number and duration of fixations per line. That is the verifiable science of speed reading in one sentence.

The process is simple. First, draw a vertical line down the center of five text pages, then draw two additional vertical lines 2” to either side of each center line. Practice fixating only at the points where these vertical lines intersect the horizontal lines of text, then progress to unmarked pages of text. By training peripheral vision and consolidating eye movement, you will be reading at least three-times faster than before.

–Tim Ferriss “The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload and Triple Productivity in 24 Hours” (pdf), p. 5