Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

I have just started reading the new book Rework (available online or in a physical bound print edition), and I love it. It’s written by Jason Fried and David Heienemeier Hansson, the founders of 37 Signals. The book is making me take a hard look at how I work, how I manage, how I relate to those around me at work, and how to reevaluate some of the “work” that we create for ourselves without really achieving anything with that time and effort. We always hear people say that “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”  If we truly take that to heart, our work improves as a result.  This book is filled with many truisms of that nature, things that make you stop and think about what you’re doing.

Working in a government department certainly provides me (as it probably does with most of my readers) with plenty of examples of inefficient work that we have to do to stay safe within city policies and regulations.  I do not fault my city, or anyone else’s…it’s the overall system that is largely broken.  It creates an organizational structure in which over-analysis, over-compensation, and over-conservativism is rewarded.  Because some idiot at some point took advantage of the system, or did something illegal, or both, we now have thousands of policies, purchasing processes that take a year to complete, approval requirements that are inane (as an example, the city manager of a city with a million people has to personally approve people’s attendance at out-of-state conferences).  Does this create a fool-proof system?  Or simply a productivity-proof system?

While I don’t agree with everything in the book, I agree with a lot of it.  It’s going to take some major shake-ups in our workplaces to make us more flexible, responsive to customer needs, and less of an artifact-organization and more of a production-organization.  I look forward to that day.