Whatever you think about 37signals — and I’m not a fan, particularly, but so what — you can’t deny that they’ve built a highly successful enterprise by epitomizing “small, fast, ruthless…all Edge.” This is a shop that does very well by surfing (and in a few cases forging) the zeitgeist, so if they have meaningful wisdom to impart, I’m all ears.

I just finished reading Rework myself. As a partner in a shop that has for some years been finding useful nuggets in the gospel of 37signals, I found their latest book to be contradictory, gratuitously inflammatory and (surprise) quite insightful.

So many people are so polarized when it comes to Jason and David and their styles of business and preaching. All the more reason to enjoy Greenfield’s unique perspective:

I’m less interested in their advice on building successful businesses than in what their own structural decisions might imply as a bellwether. Between certain traits of their core audience and the brash self-assurance with which they issue advice, the way 37signals does it now is likely to influence the way any number of startups choose to do it next year, so I paid particularly close attention to those passages in the book that described the company’s spatial and temporal organization.