Читать книгу It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, Jason Fried - Страница 8

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.