"Ignore this book at your own peril." -- Seth Godin said that about the book Rework by the founders of 37signals. Before I even finished it, I went and ordered two copies for some friends. Everyone will benefit from reading the book, but anyone who's writing software, is running a business, wants to start their own business, is a product manager, or is managing projects, really should stop whatever they are doing and take 2-4 hours to read this book.
I've read a bunch of books on various topics over the past several years -- and while many of them are really good, I usually don't talk them up too much. This book is 99% meat and no fluff.
I experienced so many of the things Jason and David write about but one in particular stands out to me. Meetings are toxic. Not all meetings, but most. When I worked at a very large Fortune 100 company, I remember getting pulled into meetings with hundreds (400-800) of others. If you take the average salary and compute the cost of this 800-1600 man hour meeting, you're in the $20,000-$50,000 range. As my old boss, Frank Dooris, used to say, "How many pagers does a sales guy have to sell to make up for that?"
I could say so much more about this book. It describes much of what inspired us to start our own developer conference for the Arena ChMS community developers. We're giving this book to all attendees of this year's RefreshCache conference. I hope you or your developers can come. We all end up hurting if you don't make it to the event, but ultimately you'll be missing out the most.