Rework falls into a genre of business books I call Short Attention Span Business Wisdom. Hugh McCloud’s Ignore Everybody, which came out shortly after Rework, falls into the same category.

There’s a lot to like in Rework. Certainly Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of 37 Signals, have learned a ton of valuable lessons on the road to building their successul company. Their lessons are—like their software—simple, to the point, and easy to consume.

One of my favorite lessons is “Why grow?” It’s so easy to get caught up in thinking bigger is better. Most VCs demand it, and many entrepreneurs presume it. It’s refreshing to know a successful software company recognizes where their own sweet spot is, and is proud to have only 16 employees. Money quote: “Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination in itself.”

And I love “Out-teach your competition”. I love the abundant-universe approach. Knowledge is not a scarce resource. Sharing your knowledge makes everyone stronger. And in the case of product companies, that sharing makes for better informed, loyal customers.

There’s plenty of inspiration to be found in these pages, and plenty of common sense, too.

Do you sense there’s a big BUT coming?

There is.

BUT I take issue — enormous issue — with the essay entitled “Learning from mistakes is overrated.” HUH?

Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes. What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don’t know what you should do next.

Wow. This is a remarkably arrogant attitude. In fact, it’s complete bullshit.

Mistakes are a part of every business. Mistakes don’t just teach you what not to do. They teach you better ways to move forward in other areas. Mistakes can open entirely new pathways of thought. And they can teach you a whole lot about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, and where your ego gets in the way.

I’ll be curious to know if Jason and David feel the same way after they have a few good mistakes under their belts.

I’m not a particulary organized person. I can hear some guffaws in response to that understatement already. My kitchen table, more often than not, is covered with piles of books and unsorted mail, it’s true. But check out my book and CD shelves. They’re alphabetized. I may be behind in cataloging, but there is organization to be found. I do like knowing how to find things, I just can’t stick with a single methodology. As for papers, files, mail… I need things in more than one place, but the geographical limitations of my home, and the fact that I simply don’t have, or want to have, more than one copy of my stuff, rule that out as an option. Turns out what I need is the new digital disorder for things to make sense to me.

Dave Weinberger’s new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, examines my dilemma. It’s another in a growing list of fascinating, readable business books focusing on the way business is changing as result of the disruptive technologies of the internet. Weinberger is the co-author of the classic The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, which came to represent a shift in thinking of the net as just another medium to recognizing that we now have the opportunity for conversations and relationships as never before. This new offering fits nicely as a sequel to Chris Anderson’s excellent The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The Long Tail showed us that the infinite inventory of web vendors allows for aggregate sales of minor titles can add up to profits even greater than the hits, and that in fact the days of blockbuster hits as we once defined them are gone. And for us consumers – there’s so much available, we can now find niches that cater to our specific interests. Everything is Miscellaneous explores how we’ll find those things.

Weinberger is clearly a pretty organized guy. He writes that "There isn’t a part of our homes that is truly unordered, except perhaps under our beds…" That’s kind of a reach. But his point is that we all employ various schemes to organize our physical space: spices go together, plates of a certain size go together, yet some things are ordered based on frequency of use.

Libraries have enormous problems to solve in deciding how to store things, for obvious reasons relating to physical space.

This is not a new issue, by a long shot. Over 2,000 years ago, scholars in Rome or Greece (depending on who you read) introduced the idea of alphabetization as a way to organize information. It took hundreds of years and many reinventions to stick. Alphabetization was considered an affront to god. It was argued that there is a natural organization for all knowledge, that alphabetization is unnatural. The Dewey Decimal System was the first widely-accepted method of organizing knowledge, employing a numeric categorization with alphabetization as the secondary sort. The high level sort was subject-based and reflects the sensibilities of a Christian man living in a small town in 1875. Thus, Philosophy was considered the foundation of everything, so it earned the the 100s. The system is heavily biased toward Christianity, of course, and (understandably) doesn’t even include computer science. Buddhism doesn’t get it’s own number, but phrenology does. A wholesale change of this system is unrealistic, again for physical reasons. And though it’s still in use in many places, it’s not at all helpful in the online world.

Online, we simply don’t need these rigid categorizations. We have tags now, and collaborative filtering. When I go to Amazon and look up a book, I get not only other related books in multiple categories spanning genres, I get a list of books bought by others who bought this particular book. I get my own customized organization system every time I visit.

Weinberger contends that as we move from physical to digital storage, we need to get rid of the idea that there is a right way to organize things. Rather, we need to embrace the inherent disorganization and allow people to access information in whatever way makes sense to them.

It’s an engaging read. If you liked The Long Tail, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you’ll like this too.

Note to self: don’t bother searching Google Images for better images for a book title with keywords like "everything" and "miscellaneous" :)

Update: Bad netiquette alert! I didn’t even provide a link to the Everything Is Miscellaneous web site! My apologies. And they were still nice enough to mention and link to this review :)

I thoroughly enjoyed Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. I just love seeing what people imagined our todays would look like. So I was thrilled to stumble upon Paleo-Future: a look into the future that never was. Is that a great name for a blog or what? My introduction to the blog was this post, which highlights a lovely collection of 100-year-old postcards depicting the year 2000. There is, of course, the obligatory personal flying machine. The “Summer at the North Pole” and “Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine” cards are almost disturbing in their innocence. Shown: The Roofed City. I wonder what’s providing all that light… Be sure to read some of the comments to this post – some quite clever.

I can’t wait to waste some serious time on this site. And I see there’s a Paleo-Future Google Group, too. Great! I need more distractions!

BoingBoing was one of the first blogs I started reading daily. It’s still a favorite, but Lifehacker rivals it. Gina Trapani is one of three editors of the Lifehacker blog, which is dedicated to all things regarding productivity. 95% is tech-related, with heavy emphasis on cross-platform, Firefox, and general open-source solutions. It’s literally changed how I work. And it’s always fun to find rock-star girl geeks. There’s a book now, too: Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, and it’s fabulous. Gina is at SXSW, and I got to meet her yesterday at her book signing. She’s delightful, as expected, and seems to be thoroughly enjoying the conference :)

Back at SXSW. I’m listening to Timothy Ferriss discuss his book, The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. I missed the first couple of minutes, unfortunately. When I walked in he was  pointing out that probably all too smart and too easily bored to ever really retire. Given that, how do our priorities change. And if we get 10% more email every year from here on out, what does that mean? He found some interesting ways to work a whole lot less, and I’m going to miss all the good info if I keep blogging… I’ve pre-ordered the book.

Had to add a note… he says “life does not improve with Twitter and Dodgeball” and talks about a backlash to information overload. Wonder how many others were blogging and twittering as he said this…