Week 44, 2018

Crazy at Work, Part 2: Goals, Aspirations, and Shared Calendars

Photo by QuickOrder on Unsplash

Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. Last week, that meant sharing three takeaways from the book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. And this week, we’ll continue on that same theme. Only this time, I’ll share three differences of opinion/objections. If you missed last week, you can find that issue here. Otherwise, read on:

1. Goals are Fake

“[W]e 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”.

Call me old fashioned but I think goals are important. That’s why I talk about Objectives and Key Results (OKR) so much. But Fried and DHH does not agree. At least if you believe the above. But I wonder!? Basecamp is known to observe a 6-week development cycle during which their team tackles a choice problem. And that, in turn, sounds suspiciously like a goal to me! It might not be a quarterly Objective, and it might not be a quantified Key Result, but it does sound like a goal — i.e., setting out to do something specific within a certain…