Nobody Likes Plastic Flowers

I'm telling all my friends to read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. They have a great mindset on how to start and run a small company, IT or not. And it's a Twitter style of book, concentrating hard on being pithy. The last-but-one draft of the book was 57,000 words, and they cut 30,000 of those. Nice one.

My favourite dicta:

• Why grow?
• Enough with "entrepreneurs"
• Ignore the details early on
• Throw less at the problem
• Meetings are toxic
• Good enough is fine
• Underdo your competition
• Say no by default
• Out-teach your competition
• Nobody likes plastic flowers

Perhaps that last one needs an explanation? People accept the imperfections of a fresh flower, even that it will decay. So why bother aiming to sound perfectly "professional"? Be yourself.