What is particularly revealing is Ryan's confession about tracking and co-ordination challenges at 37 Signals: "In some areas, it’s been really successful. I m

What is particularly revealing is Ryan's confession about tracking and co-ordination challenges at 37 Signals: "In some areas, it’s been really successful. I mean, there’s a lot of self-management happening at 37, but at the same time, what I noticed was that despite a lot of success with that, projects simply were not getting shipped." "So, I was asking myself “What’s missing? Why isn’t this happening?” And I realized that what it really takes to ship product is coordination...And, if somebody doesn’t actually take care to schedule everybody’s time, so that the right people are available at the right time, with the right context, to work together and make all those things happen, it just doesn’t happen on its own." We've been discussing the sort of culture we want at a new startup this week, and Jason Fried and DHH's opinions on tracking came up. Jason in 2006 [0]: "Christopher: We never tracked time. Not even in the client days." "Nollind, we don’t track time. Tracking time is a waste of time. Things either get done or they don’t. If they don’t, everyone knows about it." In a recent interview with Fast Company [1]: "We don’t track things in that way. I don’t look at that. I don’t want to encourage that kind of work. I want to encourage quality work." DHH in 'Refusing Administrative Minutiae' [2]: "No time-tracking, no tick tock, just clear expectations of what the client was going to get. It really opened my eyes to “you can refuse to do the shit you don’t want to do” way of running a business." I'm actually sympathetic to creating a company culture which tries to reduce as much 'big brother bureaucracy' as possible, and assumed that 37 Signals had managed this successfully by hiring late, and hiring good. However based on Ryan's comments I get the sense self-management went a little too far. Still, they've managed to achieve some success and financial reward :) [0] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3133-lessons-from-launch-help-us-learn-why-and-how-you-track-time http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3133-lessons-from-launch-help... [1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3000852/37signals-earns-millions-each-year-its-ceo%E2%80%99s-model-his-cleaning-lady http://www.fastcompany.com/3000852/37signals-earns-millions-... [2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3081-refusing-administrative-minutiae http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3081-refusing-administrative-...