It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. Jason Fried
Seriously.
This anti-goal mindset definitely makes Basecamp an outcast in the business world. Part of the minority, the ones who simply “don’t get how it works.”
We get how it works—we just don’t care. We don’t mind leaving some money on the table and we don’t need to squeeze every drop out of the lemon. Those final drops usually taste sour, anyway.
Are we interested in increasing profits? Yes. Revenues? Yes. Being more effective? Yes. Making our products easier, faster, and more useful? Yes. Making our customers and employees happier? Yes, absolutely. Do we love iterating and improving? Yup!
Do we want to make things better? All the time. But do we want to maximize “better” through constantly chasing goals? No thanks.
That’s why we don’t have goals at Basecamp. We didn’t when we started, and now, nearly 20 years later, we still don’t. We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.
But there was a brief moment when we changed our mind. We pinned up a big round revenue target—one of those fat nine-digit numbers. “Why not?” we thought. “We can do it!” But after chasing that goal for a while, we thought again. And the answer to “Why not?” became a very clear “Because (1) it’s disingenuous for us to pretend we care about a number we just made up, and (2) because we aren’t willing to make the cultural compromises it’ll take to get there.”
Because let’s face it: Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again. Nothing ever stops at the quarterly win. There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed, and beat EXPECTATIONS.
Why would you do that to yourself and your business? Doing great, creative work is hard enough. So is building a long-lasting sustainable business with happy employees. So why impose some arbitrary number to loom over your job, salary, bonus, and kid’s college fund?
Plus, there’s an even darker side to goal setting. Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers. The best intentions slip when you’re behind. Need to improve margins by a few points? Let’s turn a blind eye to quality for a while. Need to find another $800,000 this quarter to hit that number? Let’s make it harder for customers to request refunds.
Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.
Even we weren’t immune to those pressures. In the few months that we tried reaching for the big nine-digit goal, we ended up launching several projects that at best we had misgivings about and at worst made us feel a little dirty. Like spending big bucks with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to juice our signups. Cutting checks like that to further the erosion of privacy and splintering of attention just made us feel icky, but we closed our eyes for a while because, hey, we were reaching for that big number. Fuck that.
How about something really audacious: No targets, no goals?
You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don’t need something fake to do something real. And if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.
The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It’s no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING. A thousand revolutions promised all at once. Come on.
Nothing encapsulates this like the infatuation with disruption. Everyone wants to be a disrupter these days. Break all the rules (and several laws). Upend every existing industry. But if you label your own work as disruption, it probably isn’t.
Basecamp isn’t changing the world. It’s making it easier for companies and teams to communicate and collaborate. That’s absolutely worthwhile and it makes for a wonderful business, but we’re not exactly rewriting world history. And that’s okay.
If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There’s no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day’s work will come again tomorrow, even if you go home at a reasonable time.
So it becomes much harder to justify those 9 p.m. meetings or weekend sprints. And, as an added bonus, you won’t sound like a delusional braggart when you describe what you do at the next family get-together. “What do I do? Oh, I work at PetEmoji—we’re changing the world by disrupting the pet health-care insurance space.” Riiiiight.
Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.
We don’t do grand plans at Basecamp—not for the company, not for the product. There’s no five-year plan. No three-year plan. No one-year plan. Nada.
We didn’t start the business with a plan, and we don’t run the business by a plan. For nearly 20 years, we’ve been figuring it out as we go, a few weeks at a time.
For some that may seem shortsighted. They’d be right. We’re literally looking at what’s in front of us, not at everything we could possibly imagine.
Short-term planning has gotten a bum rap, but we think it’s undeserved. Every six weeks or so, we decide what we’ll be working on next. And that’s the only plan we have. Anything further out is considered a “maybe, we’ll see.”
When you stick with planning for the short term, you get to change your mind often. And that’s a huge relief! This eliminates the pressure for perfect planning and all the stress that comes with it. We simply believe that you’re better off steering the ship with a thousand little inputs as you go rather than a few grand sweeping movements made way ahead of time.
Furthermore, long-term planning instills a false sense of security. The sooner you admit you have no idea what the world will look like in five years, three years, or even one year, the sooner you’ll be able to move forward without the fear of making the wrong big decision years in advance. Nothing looms when you don’t make predictions.
Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong thing, but it’s too late to change direction because of the “Plan.” “We’ve got to see it through!” Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.
The further away you are from something, the fuzzier it becomes. The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can’t control. The best information you’ll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution. We wait for those moments to make a call.