Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried on why all companies must be prepared to kill off ideas

As a business grows over time, new ideas will evolve, and shelving past ideas becomes a necessity, no matter how successful they were.

Writing at Inc., Jason Fried, co-founder of well-known project management software company Basecamp, describes this as an “also/or” scenario.

“Most companies, products and services start out simply,” he writes.

“It’s rare that the first version of something is more complicated than the second.

“But once a company starts saying yes to one good idea after another, it starts accumulating scars. And scars they are. When companies decide to do something and it works, it usually doesn’t go away. Ideas turn permanent. Before you know it, things aren’t so simple any more.”

It could be a case of good ideas accumulating and collectively having a negative effect; Fried says if more and more good ideas are taken on without shedding earlier commitments, this “invariably leads to a place of compounding complexity”.

“Too many good ideas eventually combine to make one big bad idea,” he writes.

Fried uses the example of software becoming overloaded with settings and preferences, with each one “an example of a company’s refusing to make a choice and offloading the decision to the customer”. Read more

Martin Kovacs - Smart Company - 19 Jan 2018