If you want to learn the Basecamp view of the world, it helps to know the influences that helped form it. Basecamp, and 37signals before it, has been around since 1999. Since then there's been a number of key influencers that have marked the company culture.
- Turn The Ship Around: "Leadership should mean giving control rather than taking control and creating leaders rather than forging followers", David Marquet. Basecamp employs great people and they deserve the freedom and autonomy to act on their own. Don't wait for permission, just state what you're going to do, and then do it.
- Finding Flow: True happiness is found in optimal moments of engagement when we stretch just beyond our abilities and lose track of time and space in the process. Protecting the flow by limiting interruptions has been a driving principle of Basecamp.
- Maverick: Ricardo Semler helped us find the confidence to promote and push for weird and different ways of working by showing just how weird and different you can work at even a place as stodgy as a 8,000-person industrial company in Brazil.