I’m Not Busy, I’m Working: Inside Basecamp’s Calm Work-Life Balance Culture
Walk into any successful Silicon Valley company or high powered tech firm and you might see motivational slogans adorning the walls, figuratively and literally.
These slogans might be urging the employees to “move fast and break things”, or “fail early, fail fast, fail often”, or better yet, “fear is the disease, hustle is the antidote.”
What you probably won’t see are mantras like:
Calm is profitability.
Calm is reasonable expectations.
Calm is about 40 hours of work a week.
Or, my favourite one:
Calm is about sustainable practices that can run for the long-term.
And yet, that’s exactly the workplace culture that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the co-founders of Basecamp, have sought out to embrace for their company.
In a business world where innovation, scale, exponential growth are prioritised over all other measurements, Basecamp provides a refreshing alternative perspective to what success means.
