| Title | : | The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0147523303 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780147523303 |
| Format Type | : | Audio CD |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 |
| Publication | : | First published October 17, 2017 |
In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups - building minimal viable products ("MVPs"), extensive customer-focused testing based on a build, measure, learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to a whole new group of organizations: iconic multinationals like GE and Toyota, Silicon Valley tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a new management system that leads to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential roadmap for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.
The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise Reviews
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Oh, my dear. I loved the "Lean Startup," but with this book, Eric Ries shows that he is out of his waters.
The basic and only "major" idea of this book is to make Entrepreneurship a line function of every company, e.g., such as HR, Finance, IT, Sales and Purchasing are. In contrast to the other departments, the "Entrepreneurship" unit has some matrix functions in the other line functions, such as training and coaching entrepreneurs and maintaining start-ups like funding and governance structures - primarily external start-up functions internally inside a company.
In the main part, Ries is promoting starting a big, very conventional change program to hammer Entrepreneurship into an organization. He dreams up a "unified theory of management," which is so weak and not grounded in any organizational research at all. Basically, Mr. Ries tells Managers to behave better and think of Entrepreneurship in all that they are doing. Pitiful.
This book is very shallow. Any fundamental questions on how to escape the systematic biases of management hierarchies against truth and pro playing politics are not addressed at all. The lessons learned from Kahnemann and Tversky on the fallibility of human decisions made by individual decision makers are ignored. The ignorance of empirical research is striking. Claiming a "unified Theory of Management" on this base is more than pretentious.
Shame on you Amazon for not doing a better work guarding against these 34 5 Star Reviews which have been there already on day one of the Release. Shame on all the guru authors like Marshall Goldsmith, Tom Peters, Clayton Christensen, Lawrence Summers, Robert Sutton etc. for embracing this book. I know you know better. And you know it too.
A full review can be found on
https://managementdigital.net/2017/10... -
As its title and pitch stands, the Startup Way is basically Lean Startup applied to big corporations.
Though the book may resonate with employees of large companies, I found several limitations:
- Eric Ries obviously has some experience of the corporate world, but the whole book mostly revolves around his coaching work at GE.
- If you're not a top executive, the book won't be of much help. Ries advocates that the transformation has to start from the top and be strongly supported by CxO level. Though it is true to a certain extent, if I am an intrapreneur constantly struggling with bureaucracy, I won't get many answers on how to deal with that other than "get support from top execs".
The big question still remains: how do I hack my organization if I am a low-level employee? -
Sometimes an author writes such an excellent book that you are willing to buy his/her next book, sight unseen. Eric Ries' outstanding The Lean Startup is still something I reference and ask new business partners and employees to read because it's such a fine and important book.
This is not.
Eric took the nimble world of startups and tried to pretend that discussing GE and the US government would be of interest to his Lean Startup audience. A total yawner that I had to struggle through and then finally skimmed the last 100 pages just to end the misery.
Best ideas in the book are recapitulations of the highlights of The Lean Startup. The irony is that Eric seems to have written a book simply as a byproduct of the consulting work he's been doing without asking whether there were customers who really wanted the book, thus ignoring a key Lean principle. Nobody wanted this book, Eric, and now you found out.
(definition of a startup) "a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." (p. 4)
(quoting General Eisenhower) "plans are useless, but planning is indispensible." (p. 73)
(definition of company culture) "the shared, often unstated, beliefs that determine what employees believe to be possible, because 'that's just the way things are around here'" (p. 124)
(definition of a second founding) "the period in a company's growth when it goes from being just another organization to an institution that's here to stay. It's the moment when the company grows up and adopts a managerial culture." (p. 223) -
The title should sound "Lean Startup based on examples from more mature organizations". If you already read Lean Startup by Eric Ries you can skip the first part of The Startup Way.
In this book are plenty of interesting tips or case studies, but most of them are too general. "Company X had a problem, they implemented the lean methodology, made some tests and everyone was happy". In the middle of case studies usually, I felt I had missed some crucial details about the magic, I listened again the beginning of the case study and usually, it turned out that there was nothing to miss.
I'm sure Eric Ries has a huge knowledge, I'd love to find it more in his newest book. Too much general speaking about supporting creative and entreprenual ideas. -
این کتاب برای ترجمه به دستم رسید. و باید بگم که کتاب بسیار خوبی بود برای کسانی که به دنبال تمایز و تحول سازمانشان در عصر کنونی هستند. کتاب از راه حل های کارافرینانه که در کتاب قبلی این نویسنده و برای استارتاپ ها و کارآفرینان نوشته شده بهره برده و ان اصول را در سازمان های بزرگ و دیوانسالار اجرا میکنه.
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Very nice followup to the Lean Startup - but not as revolutionary for me, hence only 4 stars. As for the content of the book itself, the fact, that author pulled off Lean Startup approach in one of the iconic large organisations, adds a lot of credibility to it (and it's very interesting to read). I did not understood validated learning part though - or I'm just dissappointed that it boils down "just" to the set of metrics. I will definitely go back to that book many times, while trying to implement at least parts of that approach in my daily work, and I think I will need a set of concrete tools and guidelines.
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Read the full review at my site
Digital Amrit
At a certain point, when your transformation has grown powerful enough to affect an entire company, when it has totally won out over whatever culture it was designed to replace, it is also itself too big for radical changes.
What is the book about?
The Startup Way is written by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup.
This purpose of The Startup Way is to start with the Lean Startup principles and apply them in an enterprise context to make organisations move toward a leaner, more iterative way of working. This book provides the blueprint for transforming an organisation to rekindle its entrepreneurial spirit that is capable of finding new sources of growth for the long-term. Obviously, The Lean Startup is required reading (among other books) for The Startup Way to be really effective.
What does this book cover?
The Startup Way has three parts.
The first part about traditional management and its failings, the need for something new and the rise of entrepreneurial management. The second part talks about the roadmap for transformation, how does it affect all functions in an organisation, the challenges and opportunities. The third part about what to do once the transformation is “complete”.
What did I like?
The Startup Way provides an excellent and insightful look at transforming an organisation along lean startup principles. I liked it due to its reliance on experience and ideas.
Eric Ries has used real life examples from his time at GE and healthcare.gov (predominantly) to explain how lean startup principles can apply even in large, well established enterprises. He gives the example of an engine that has been developed by following a MVP process which boggles ones mind. This experience from the trenches makes the content relatable and believable.
Read the full review at my site
Digital Amrit -
Already a fan of Eric Ries from his earlier work, I eagerly picked up this book. In this book he discusses how companies, irrespective of their size, and he uses his work with General Electic as a potent example, can use the startup way when thinking about product development, flexibility in thinking and the willingness to seek alternative solutions to the tested and tried formula that has worked for many years or is ingrained in the thinking of the company.
It is a potent reminder of why we shouldn't allow ourselves to become slaves to habit and open our eyes to new processes. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it inspired me to changes in how we work inside our company. -
In this book, Eric Ries shared how is possible to create and scale up the lean startup thinking inside big companies. Based on examples like Intuit, General Electric, and the American Government, the author explains how those organizations use the startup way when thinking about product development, flexibility in thinking and the willingness to seek alternative solutions to be tested.
In my opinion, the book was written to convince CxO level the importance of rebuild organizations for the 21-century reality. -
More details on my blog:
https://www.jackvinson.com/blog/2018/...
A colleague handed me a copy of The Startup Way by Eric Ries because it is being referenced more and more in the work she is doing - and the predecessor (Lean Startup) has been on my to-read list for some time. Even without reading the predecessor, Ries summarizes the main Lean Startup concepts - and many of the ideas are readily heard in popular media.
In essence, this book is about taking the Lean Startup concepts and applying them much more broadly - inside companies, non-profits, governments, and or even a lemonade stand. Most of the ideas and proposals in the book make a lot of sense, and it is useful for me to have them collected in this fashion. Where I have further questions, it is mostly a question of curiosity rather than thinking that something is “wrong” in the ideas presented.
The bulk of the book does what it says on the cover. It’s fairly easy to read and is peppered with plenty of examples from large organizations that have implemented these ideas and transformed into more modern, entrepreneurial companies. I might be interested to hear more about experiments that have been run at companies where it didn’t turn out so well, but then I suppose that has been built into the overall approach recommended in the book. (Sadly, at least one of success story companies, GE with FastWorks, isn’t doing too well - there’s an Inc.com article on the topic by Greg Satell, Has the Lean Startup Finally Jumped the Shark, that tries to give some perspective.) -
You might say you can achieve continuous innovation but sustaining it actually means you are signing into continuous transformation which unrealistic in most enterprise organizations. "Corporate transformation is corporate entrepreneurship."
Pivoting is among the central themes in this book also (meaning a change in direction without a change in vision).
I liked the definition and description of Executive level Champions whose key role is removing obstacles standing in way of the innovating teams.
I went through the innovation accounting part twice to get some hints on how to make metered funding happen but as the author also said that you have to figure it out yourself under the specific scenario and it shouldn't be straightforward in a large enterprise. "Metered funding is the most powerful tool to drive innovation in organizations."
Levels of metered funding:
1. Opportunity identified and approved.
2. Problem defined, market seized and validated, target segment identified.
3. Value proposition tested, business models constructed.
4. MVP's iteratively tested and refined. Key hypotheses validated. Scaling.
5. Full market launch and commercialization.
The lower the level, the more initiatives fall out, a fraction if any will reach the final stage.
Weaknesses:
*It can only work if started from top down with full executive level commitment and drive, without the environment support we can only have local optimizations.
*Another weakness is describing the desired states but putting little focus on how to get through the first major chasms standing on your way.
*Most enterprise examples are from GE and the rest are from other startups or unicorns, this does not make the viability of the approach very credible in large enterprises.
*Stating that "The Startup Way" is the missing link from Toyota Production System is a bit pushing it over the limit.
The key recipe according to Ries:
1. Fully understand the Lean Startup model (MVP, experimentation, pivots, leap of faith, assumptions, iterations&learning).
2. Gain top management buy-in to a big change management program
3. Institutionalizing entrepreneurship in a separate line function
4. Continually change the process of a company by experimentation and iteration
(doesn't sound so novel actually)
As a whole the approach does not look doable, 4 stars because several ideas viewed in isolation are thought provoking. Recommendation is to take those ideas and ignore the "not so disrupting" parts, here is a reality check:
https://liberated.company/2017/10/21/... -
La verdad que es un libro que da gusto leer no solo por las ideas que desarrolla, sino que también por los valores que tiene el autor. Es el segundo libro que leo de Eric Ries y me han parecido fantásticos...!!!
El placer fue doble porque cuando leí «El método Lean Startup» una de las primeras cosas que se me ocurrió es "esto sirve para adentro de las organizaciones (para todo tipo de organizaciones)" y leer unos años después que el autor no solo pensó eso, sino que implementó en una amplia variedad de organizaciones este método y lo sintetizó y sistematizó en un "camino" o "manera de hacer las cosas", en un libro ampliamente recomendable, fue genial para mí.
Creo que este es el enfoque que tienen que tener todas las organizaciones del siglo XXI, cualquier persona que trabaje en una organización debería leer este libro...!!!
Los métodos, técnicas, y recomendaciones incluidas no se muestran como meras elucubraciones teóricas que podrían funcionar, sino que se presentan como casos de éxito y lecciones aprendidas de su implementación real -en este siglo- en una amplia variedad de organizaciones de distinto tipo. -
Vaikea sanoa, kuinka paljon tämä kirja antoi lisäarvoa Riesin edelliseen The Lean Startup Way -teokseen verrattuna. Epäilen että tähän on kaksi syytä: ensinnäkin kirja toistaa ainakin alkuun melko paljon edeltäjäänsä, ja varsinaisia uusia ajatuksia saa kalastella vähän isommankin haavin kanssa.
Toisekseen suomennos oli luvattoman huono. Itse asiassa malliesimerkki siitä, mitä eroa on sillä, että kääntää kirjan jokaisen sanan erikseen sellaisenaan verrattuna siihen tulkintatyöhön, mitä kääntäjät tekevät. Ihmettelin, kun lukeminen takkusi, kunnes noin kolmanneksen luettuani havahduin tähän ja luin lopun kirjan pelkällä sinnillä kuvitellen tekstin mielessäni englanniksi. Se onnistui oikein hyvin, kun vain käänsi sanat yksi kerrallaan englanniksi...
Sinänsä luulen saaneeni kiinni siitä, mitä eroa perinteisellä suunnittelulla ja kokeilukehittämisellä on, ja ehkä joitain ideoita myös siihen, miten jälkimmäistä pitäisi johtaa. Enimmäkseen kuitenkin puhisin turhautuneena, kun tuntui, etten enää suomea osannut lukea. -
I learned a lot Ries' first book the Lean Startup and thought it brought some great practices together. The Startup Way aims to apply those Lean Startup ideas to major corporations using GE as a case study.
I found chapters 3-5 to be the strongest.
The gap Ries leaves is for startups who have lost their way because they were initially successful and have grown past a two pizza team size. The entrepreneurial and risk taking takes a back seat to scaling and normalizing.
For a startup that's grown it's good to review the chapter 3 qualities of the start up way: team focus, customer focus, employees given a stake (ESOP), leading indicators (engagements, conversions not revenue, profitability), meter funding (when does taking another round become a bad thing?), meritocracy, mission driven, and entrepenurialism as a career.
If your startup doesn't have these attributes teams then your not moving forward and your becoming a big company on a small scale. Breaking out of this is where Ries could be helpful, but he goes back to GE.
Chapter 4 is a nice review of Lean Startup - start with leap of faith assumptions, use MVP and Validated, Learning to get a Pivot or Perserve point. I found Sprint better at explaining this process see my review here:
https://medium.com/@Dave.Nash.33/forg...
Chapter 5 talks about how to add accountability, process, culture and people to the start up way. On page 126 of the hard cover Ries has a diagram of the startup way that infuses traditional and start up org charts and includes entrepreneurialism as a function like marketing or accounting. This was the peak of the book for me.
So is the rest helpful? Only at a major corporation with huge management buy-in. Even GE - peaked last year at $32 and right now is in free fall down to $14 in market that's up 30% its down 50%. Imelt was a forward thinking CEO and HBR did a nice write up of how he improved GE in the September 2017 issue. It's good they did that then because now GE doesn't look so hot. I don't claim to be an expert in GE but that hurts the long term story for Ries. -
The “Lean Startup” is one of the best business books I’ve read, and this book is even bolder and more ambitious. It’s a comprehensive, detailed vision for how companies can manage “continuous transformation.” I found it compelling, useful, and inspiring.
It’s not a breezy read. (There is a chapter on accounting, after all.) But the tone is so positive and encouraging that I can’t help but be a huge Eric Ries fan, and look forward to following up on more of his work. -
Listened to the audiobook.
This book explains lots of methods which can help to increase the entrepreneurial mindset of the people working for a company and methods which make use of try-and-learn principles. -
The sequel to The Lean Startup is a pretty terrible book, that was a belaboured read. In this edition, Eric Ries argues for big companies and government organisations to be more entrepreneurial by changing their models of management to encourage innovation.
Key Takeaways
Part One: The Modern Company
One of the reasons it’s hard to build new things at larger companies is because people don’t have the mental model of “My job is to actually learn new things.”
Protecting and growing an existing product while experimenting with new ones is critical to success in the twenty-first century, and a hallmark of a modern company.
In order for an organization to take advantage of its latent entrepreneurial talent, it must invest in making the broad pool of its employee base aware of the possibilities of entrepreneurship as a career path and to embrace good ideas from any level of the organization.
One of the responsibilities of the entrepreneurial function is to weave startup thinking into the cultural fabric of the organization.
To support this way of working, the organisation must answer:
1. How to create space for experiments with appropriate liability constraints? In Lean Startup, these are called minimum viable products ( MVPs).
2. How to fund projects without knowing the return on investment ( ROI) in advance?
3. How to create appropriate milestones for teams that are operating autonomously?
4. How to provide professional development and coaching to help people get better at entrepreneurship as a skill?
5. How to provide networking and matchmaking in and out of the company, so people understand their new identity: “I’m a corporate entrepreneur.”
6. How to put the right person on the right team?
7. How to create new incentive and advancement systems?
Part Two: The How of the Startup Way
The 3 phases of The Startup Way:
Phase one - critical mass:
- Start small
- Build dedicated, cross-functional teams
- Wield the golden sword (clear away bureaucratic obstacles)
- Design a good experiment (hypothesis, next action, risk containment, a tie between what is measured and one hypothesis)
- Create new ways to measure success (leading indicators)
- Work by exception
- Translate this way of working into terms the organization can understand.
Phase two - scaling up:
- Identify the challenges faced by pilot teams
- Implement a widespread rollout
- Identify and make use of executive-level champions
- Train representatives of all internal functions
- Establish an in-house coaching program
- Set up the mechanisms of metered funding and growth boards
Phase Three - Deep systems:
- From gatekeeper functions (delayed) to enabling functions (accelerated). Create a one-page guide that laid out, in plain English, a series of parameters within which teams would be pre-cleared to work
- Dual roles: support the entrepreneurial efforts of product and project teams and create their own entrepreneurial process to streamline their own functional responsibilities
- Testing and validating
- Ideas and way of working must become deeply baked into a company’s DNA.
Part Three: The Big Picture
The organization must:
- Assign responsibility for the entrepreneurship function to somebody and gives them real operating responsibility instead of designating them merely as futurists or instigators
- Build a career path and a specialized performance development process for entrepreneurial talent
- Facilitate cross-training of entrepreneurs across the pillars.
- Offer training, mentorship, support, coaching, and best practices to foster excellence in entrepreneurship across the organization.
- Give entrepreneurship a seat at the table when the other functions—especially gatekeeper functions
Conclusion
The thesis of this book is that companies are better off when they apply lean thinking to the way their organisations are managed.
Aside from the writing being incredibly dull, there aren't a broad enough range of examples for this idea to hold water across the board. In many ways, it felt like a re-hashing of The Lean Startup at worst, an application of it at best - that maybe should have been a chapter or two in the previous book or a blog post. -
Good book for implementing new technologies, Startup visions and planing into the corporate and big companies (multinational aswell). some replacement of famous lean management concept was discussed in the book, highly recommended also for every new startup willing to achieve a minimum viable product.
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Muy buen libro y excelente propuesta para aplicar el pensamiento Lean en grandes organizaciones. Si deseas ver un resumen dejo el link a mi canal de YouTube. No olvides suscribirte y activar la campana para ver más resúmenes de los libros que leo.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=unHFMKo... -
Just another classic from Ries.
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i enjoyed this book more than i did his first book. I feel like it expanded on the concepts better than just focusing on how to get to prototype alone. He did provide numerous examples of how his questions led to prototypes being explored that otherwise weren't though to be on the table. He had a clear example of this with GE in the book with a new model engine. As i read the book it gave me different lenses for which to view things from and got me thinking about various things i could be doing which is why i gave it the rating i did.
Another aspect i liked in the book was about his items for innovation accounting dashboards and content for them. I have pasted them below since they are barried in a later chapter, but if the book doesn't interest you i think these items would at least get you thinking about if they are items you track and they are:
-Conversion rates - percentage of free trial users that become paying customers
-Revenue per customer - amount customers pay per product on average
-Lifetime value per customer - amounts a company accrues from a customer over their lifetime with the company
-Retention rate – number of customers that are still using a product over a certain period of time
-Cost per customer – amount it costs to serve a customer on average
-Referral rate – what percentage of customers refer new customers to the product
-Channel adoption – what relevant distribution channels carry the product.
I don't feel like you need to have read his first book for this book to have the impact it did for me. However books like his first and this one i think help to stem peoples mind from thinking big to thinking small. Even if you feel like you already think small/mmr/mvp well i think books like this will always plant seeds in your mind for how you could do it better.
I recommend this book for anyone who is involved with visioning products and helping to set scope for mvps/mmrs for a product. -
Having been an engineering manager cum entrepreneur myself for 12+ years, the philosophy of lean and experiment-based innovation harmonises very well with my own experiences and ways of scaling engineering teams. Its a book that is resoundingly clear especially for those of us who have been through the trenches and can empathise with the problems and solutions that are presented, but i think it could also be misconstrued as being too self-sufficient, avoiding the landmines that do emerge, giving readers a utopian view of lean startup cultures without the messiness of national and organizational cultures, short versus longer termism and architectural tech debt. Towards the last few chapters, it increasingly becomes less practical, a lot more visionary, but still insightful if you don't mind reading for ideas and hopes for a better world.
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The beginning of the book was good-ish, mainly a rehash of The Lean Startup and utilizing it in more established companies and in teams in these types of companies. The second half got to be quite a bore and wasn't at all as well written or thought out. Way over the top business restructuring ideas for setting up "startup boards" within companies to manage teams within them and some weird half thought out ideas about having teams within companies "IPO" into their own divisions or get acquired through "internal M&A processes" to various other teams. The very end of the book was ideas how society could be transformed to better suit and nurture entrepreneurship in the sense of starting own companies again, when the rest of the book was mainly about nurturing entrepreneurship within established teams. Not very coherent, a pretty big disappointment. I really wanted to like this book more.
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I would give this book 5 stars if I were a corporate innovator or on any kind of corporate innovation team. It is the most definitive solution for corporate innovation I’ve read. I only gave it four stars because I work with early-stage start ups and while Eric‘s suggestions are very relevant for start ups once they scale and have 100 employees are more, roughly, his earlier book lean start up is a better fit for the founders I work with.
I also loved his policy ideas listed in the epilogue and his foreshadowing of the dangers of short termism are extremely on point and relevant to today’s investing landscape. -
The title of the book is a reminder of the famous "The Toyota Way". It's goal is to be a seminal book for the Lean Startup the same way the original is for the Lean. The goal is probably not achieved, but the transposition efforts of the author toward "Lean Startup for the entreprise" deserve considerations, espacially the intraprenarial ideas. The stories that support the ideas are also very well told.
Ma note de lecture en Français ici -
Summary:
This book was an in depth look at how entrepreneurial methods that are usually reserved for small scale endeavours can be implemented into large organisations. And that they should be implemented. The author states that the entrepreneurial way offers a great advantage to companies in modern business and that old ways of doing businesses inhibit growth, employee sanctification and the ultimate value of the organisation. I think this book is really valuable and informs a new way of working that businesses can really benefit from. I think the principles are easier to implement in businesses that are still establishing rather than big, already established businesses, but the author does provide examples of how these methods can impact established businesses positively. I don't have a direct use for this content yet, except in minor ways within my current organisation, but I hope to read the author's other back and refer to their teachings as my career evolves in the trajectory I have planned.
I would recommend this book to anyone involved in entrepreneurship, anyone seeking to make a change in their organisation or to create an organisation.
The main message I took from this book is that an entrepreneurial method and culture can be built within large organisations and offers a great advantage to those involves.
Some notable points:
- A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
- The startup way is an organisational approach to business that allows businesses to create sustained growth through continuous innovation. This way builds on five key principles:
1. Continuous innovation. Businesses should always be seeking to break new ground.
2. Start up as a unit of work. Teams should be treated as small start up companies.
3. The missing function. Each business is missing a function, usually entrepreneurship. Find this function.
4. The second founding. Each business should go through the process of founding again to ensure continued growth.
5. Continuous transformation. Be flexible and able to change.
- Failure is a part of business. Continue to experiment, embrace failure and learn from your mistakes.
- A modern company is composed of leaders and the entrepreneurs they empower. A modern company pursues a portfolio of smart experiments and contains the cost of failure by investing more in the ones that work, using a system of metered funding that increases as success is proved. A modern company is one in which efficiency means figuring out the right thing to do for customers by what whatever means necessary. A modern company rewards productive failures that lead to smart changes in direction and provide useful information. A modern company leaves competitors in the dust through continuous innovation.
- Think big, start small and scale fast.
- There is something uniquely powerful about a small, dedicated team trying to change the world.
- Steps to starting a project:
1. Identify the beliefs about what must be true in order for the startup to succeed, these are called leap of faith assumptions.
2. Create an experiment to test these assumptions as quickly an inexpensive as possible this is called a minimal viable product.
3. Think like a scientist, treat each experiment as an opportunity to learn what's working and what's not, this is called validated learning.
4. Take the learning from each experiment and start the loop over again, this cycle of iteration is called the build, measure, learn feedback loop.
5. On a regular schedule, make a decision about whether to pivot or persevere.
- When doing research with customers, be careful not to just ask customers what they want. Design experiments to observe it.
- You can feel product market fit when it's happening as customers buy products or service as quickly as you can supply it.
-Risk containment strategies include: restricting the number of customers who are exposed, not putting the corporate brand on the MVP, not compromising safety or compliance (even better, having a compliance expert on the team), giving the customer a more than money back guarantee or offering to pay extra penalties for non-performance.
- A good indicator of success is customer engagement and satisfaction. Early passionate users help grow a product immensely through word of mouth.
- Replace traditional metrics like return of investment with validated learning. Validated learning is done through scientifically gathered information based on experiments. The more you learn through a project and its experiments, the better the project.
- Having an executive sponsor can be invaluable to a start up by being an advocate for the project and the team while also wielding corporate clout and helping with approvals.
- You can't replicate. Run your own experiments and apply your own process to find what works specifically for your organisation.
- Here is an example of an entrepreneurial belief system that was instilled in a large company:
1. Customers determine our success.
2. Stay lean to go fast.
3. Learn and adapt to win.
4. Empower and inspire each other.
5. Deliver results in an uncertain world.
- The second founding is often when bureaucracy and lethargy set in and the entrepreneurial spirit (and the company's entrepreneurs leave), this should be an opportunity to reinvigorate the culture and the company.
-A startup founder should go from the leader of a small team to the leader of an ecosystem of small teams.
- Genius is widely distributed, opportunity is not. We should seek to empower others in their entrepreneurial endeavours. Not everyone will have the same opportunities as you.
- Here is a bill of rights to workers that can inform company policy, management and employees:
1. The right to know that the work I do all day is meaningful to someone other than my boss.
2. The right to have my idea turned into a minimum viable product and evaluated rigorously and fairly.
3. The right to become an entrepreneur at any time as long as I am willing to do the hard work to make things happen with limited resources.
4. The right to stay involved with my idea as it scales as long as I am contributing productively to its growth.
5. The right to equity ownership in the growth I helped to create no matter my role or job title. -
As the originator of the "Lean Startup" concept and popularizing the notion of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Eric Ries often gets accused of feeding the get-rich-quick technology ecosystem. For every story about, say, Juicero, there is some pundit two steps away ready to pounce and say startup methods are to blame. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Ries is about; what he teaches is actually process, discipline and methodology to reduce an enterpreneur's probability of failure. In this way, he is oriented towards building companies and products that last.
The Startup Way can actually be read as two distinct books: first, a lengthy case study on the application of Lean Startup methods to General Electric (GE), one of the world's largest and most well-respected companies, as they undertook a transformation of how they bring products to market. The second part of the book can be regarded as a polemic for how industry, government and indeed society need to change in order to create more entrepreneurship, and that focusing on delivering long-term value is what's important.
I appreciated Ries's viewpoints on the latter, although I am cynical that he will find many allies to join him, politicians and financiers being incentivized today towards the complete opposite (short-term optimization). It would take a fundamental change in our economic system precipitated by a painful, explosive event -- say, a civil war over differing values -- in order for this to happen. Nevertheless, I applaud him for putting his money where his mouth is and using his substantial privilege to try something like the Long-Term Stock Exchange to really try and change markets.
On the former topic, I took away one lesson, which is that "yes, an enterprise as large as GE can undergo such a transformation... but it can only happen with executive-level support". Assuming that FastWorks at GE has had the radical impact on product development that he talks about, it only succeeded because no less than Jeffrey Immelt, GE's CEO, was the executive sponsor. Ries makes the cogent observation that the lessons learned from GE are no less applicable to companies of any level, but how many such CEOs are willing to buck the trend of their short-term compensation incentives and lead such a transformation? In the end, even Immelt himself was walked out the door by
"investors [who] grew disenchanted as the company’s stock price and profits stagnated in recent years" so the answer to the question of what kind of a CEO would sponsor something like this? is either an altruist or one who is so close to retirement that he could care less about career suicide.
GE may be a success story for Ries, and for that, we should applaud both him, and Immelt's vision. What we are left with, though, as with most business books, is a wonderful tale that is largely non-replicatable at other companies. That isn't to say that Ries' product development tactics are bad, or that it's not worth middle managers and "change agents" tilting at windmills to try and make them real. But it certainly won't be as smooth a journey as the book reads. -
En general, me parece que nos hemos estacionado y obsesionado con la palabra emprendimiento (tomando en cuenta que uno de mis libros trata sobre este tema), como hace varios años era el liderazgo, y antes de eso, la ciencia y tecnología, y antes, del estado y el gobierno, y antes...antes...
El problema, creo, tiene que ver con, saturar el concepto con cosas que no son, manosearlo, hasta el grado de quitarle su verdadero valor.
Este "método", lo único que tiene de novedoso, son los conceptos o palabras creativas...y observar lo que las organizaciones hacen mal, para justificar lo que la ciencia de la administración y la empresa ha resuelto desde hace varios años con gran esfuerzo, análisis, observación, pero sobre todo con rigor.
Si bien es cierto, que la propuesta de Lean Startup, tomó al mundo por sorpresa, integrando unas propuestas, no nuevas, pero si enfocadas en otra dimensión del emprendimiento empresarial y de la tecnología, hoy The Startup Way, queda muy atrás. El furor de la palabra comenzará a bajar, en algún momento y me parece que puede ser pronto, eso no significa que el ecosistema emprendedor o las empresas serán mejores o peores, solo que, ahora cambiaremos de moda intentando inventar, algo que no necesita nuevos métodos, o estructuras, al menos en lo esencial...
La efectividad del emprendimiento, no viene, a pesar de lo dicho en ciertos libros, de la estrategia o los modos, sino de las personas.
The Startup Way aplicado, no hace más atractivo el trabajo, tampoco lo hace más humano, ninguna estructura puede hacer eso, solo las personas comprometidas y los buenos líderes, que por lo general son emprendedores, pueden cambiar al mundo y a la empresa, es cierto que una buena estructura ayuda, pero sin las personas adecuadas esto no funciona...ahí Eric Ries, que me parece un prodigio, encuentra una linea, aunque la deja de seguir, por enfocarse demasiado en "The Startup way", se pierde...o al menos eso creo.
Me parece una literatura interesante, en la dimensión de eficacia en la empresa, olvidando la atractividad y la trascendencia a nivel profundo, aunque intenta abordarlos, no logra conectar las esferas. Hay redundancia en sus principios y ejemplos, al final, me pareció pesado seguirlo leyendo.
En fin, estoy seguro que hay técnicos que sacarán mas provecho de esta lectura, curiosamente, no lo recomendaría a emprendedores...
