Jason Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you may have seen this question, but the question is, what is a spectacular failure of someone trying to follow your advice and failing when it doesn't stick? What is the reason? People trying to make a rapid, fundamentally, 180 degree changes quickly is a great way to fall flat on your face, basically. I have seen people who try to adopt, let's say, Shape Up, and they come back six weeks later and they're like, "This sucks. This doesn't work." I'm like, "I'm not surprised to hear that. Tell me how you did it." And then, they explain like, "Oh, the next project we did, we did this." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm really not surprised to hear that now." Because you can't really do that. You can't turn on a dime. There's this thing called momentum. I always try to think of things in terms of the physical world. The more massive an object, the more energy it takes to change its direction. This is why big companies move slowly. This is also why momentum, which is the way you've been working for four years, is going to power you forward in a certain way. It's very hard to turn the corner immediately or turn around. You just cannot do it physically. If you can't do it physically, you can't do it this way. I think that's what I've seen, is these rapid like, "All right, starting tomorrow, we're starting Shape Up." It's like, well, no, it's not going to work. Unless you say we're going to do it on this other thing that doesn't matter so much. That's one thing I would say. The other thing is that pretty much every business is a spectacular failure. It just is. It's like, business is really hard and the ones that make it are all outliers. This is why most businesses fail. There's a million reasons why, and it's always hard to pin it down. And we can all look back. By the way, I don't like to look back on things. I'm not much of a fan of looking back on failures and trying to figure out what went wrong so we don't do it again, because I don't think we know what went wrong. I think we can spend a long time trying to analyze it and we're going to find something that we can agree on, and it tends to be what you can agree on so you can move on. But that doesn't mean that's what it was. Just like we don't really know why you make decisions, you don't really know why things didn't work. Sometimes there are some examples, and I think it's true if you're talking about a mechanistic system. You're stamping metal and it's supposed to have perfect circles and it's an oval. You can go back to that machine and see how the thing worked, and the line. You can adjust that and fix that. A lot of work though is not that way, especially software work, where there's a million different inputs and a million different people. It's not simple stamping machines. It's a different thing. I don't know, but I do think that trying to make big changes too quickly is a primary reason. You've seen this approach work at traditional companies, I imagine? It's not just companies that work in your way where there's no investors, they're not obsessed with growth? You've seen Shape Up implemented at traditional public type companies?…

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