Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

SECOND REVISION: 37Signals is now ACTIVELY MANAGING the comments about this horrid book. They sent a barrage of fanboys to this page to "unlike" this post to move it down the page. There it is in a nutshell folks. Everything I said in this original review -- about 37Signals being an empty suit -- is proven true. Apparently, 37Signals' advice to "pick a fight," means to pick a fight with anyone but them. REVISION: Have you noticed that every time a negative review is posted about this book, the book is magically bombarded with positive one- and two-line reviews that "move" that negative review down the page and keep the book in the four- to five-star range? There's your 37Signals pathology. We don't have to have a good product as long as people THINK we have a good product. We can be paper-thin content-wise, but as long as we keep our four-star rating -- and keep negative reviews buried -- we'll continue to be "successful." Classic. ORIGINAL REVIEW: I had high expectations for this book. I really wanted to like it. But, let's face it: this book is not operating in the real world; it's operating in the 37Signals world. I'm happy they developed their company from scratch and have managed to keep it small and profitable. It is true what they say in the book that your company is more nimble and flexible when it is small. Growth is not only difficult to manage, it's difficult to maintain and even more difficult to sustain. They claim that the reason they've managed to stay small is because they won't compromise their principals and add things to their products THEY don't think their customers need. What they call the "simplicity" of their products, most people call the "limitations" of their products. But, if you look at the 37Signals products, you will see that they are horrifically over-priced. You get far less for your money than with many other comparable products. I should know. I've tried them all. And let's get something else out of the way too: this book IS NOT 288 pages long. Oh, there are 144 sheets of paper folded in half and glued into a book with writing on them to make it LOOK like there's 288 pages. But this book is really about 100 pages long. I read the entire book in about two hours -- and I'm a "meticulous" reader. Almost every other page is some sort of graphic. All the chapters end abruptly and within four or five pages (with the exception of one or two chapters). Yes, I teach at a business school. And, yes, business school theory is pretty much the antithesis of what is in this book -- or, rather, what is in this book is the antithesis of business school theory. That appeals to some people for its heretic value. But I can tell you that I also counsel budding entrepreneurs, and the theoretical foundation established in business school works for more people than the devil-may-care-let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may laissez-faire attitude purported in this book. It's common knowledge that the way to sell books is to buck conventional wisdom. Take the opposite point of view. That's fine if you want to write a book bucking conventional wisdom, but MAKE YOUR CASE. Don't fill a book full of platitudes, opinions and unsupported, unsubstantiated evidence (and using your own company as an example most of the time) and then expect us to swallow it without questioning it. In all fairness, one of the tenets of this book is to keep things simple. This book unabashedly attempts to make the case that the more you can simplify, the easier your life will be. Undeniably. But complexity and details are what the real world is made of. Following their own advice, everything in the book is stripped down to bare bones. They even say in the book that there was a wholesale reduction in the size of the book just before it went to print. I would have liked to have seen what they threw away. There might have been more substance, more detail -- and it might have been a more likable book. Instead, this book attempts to make the case for the following: * Don't work hard * Don't plan for anything * Don't have meetings * Charge more (for less) * Above all else, limit growth as much as possible * Emulate drug dealers (not kidding) * Follow your heart, not your customers (huh?) * "Underdo your competition" (that's a direct quote) * BAD-MOUTH YOUR COMPETITION (this might be the dumbest advice I've ever read in a book. Try this experiment sometime: go into a job interview and say extremely bad things about your former boss. Watch how fast you're shown the door). Some reviewers (and the book itself) have stated that this book is for new entrepreneurs. If you start a business of any substance and you follow the rules in this book, you will fail. And, $22? SERIOUSLY?? This book (and the pricing of it) is a metaphor for the entire 37Signals company: stripped down product, very little substance and a high price tag. Again, I hate that I hate it, because I really wanted to like it when I first started reading it. Two hours later, I was done with it and no smarter than I was when I started it.