New book review for The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries, Crown Business, 2011, reposted here:
Copy (uncorrected proof) provided by Amazon.
Good introduction to the application of Lean principles to the startup effort. As with its Lean ancestry in the manufacturing world, and later other areas of business such as software development, Lean seeks to eliminate any waste that does not add value to the end customer. Applied to the startup, Lean enables entrepreneurs to determine what customers want during product development to help minimize wasted efforts when rolling out products to the marketplace. As Ries states in his introduction, this is a book for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable.
The five principles of the Lean Startup that are pervasive throughout this text are as follows: (1) entrepreneurs are everywhere, (2) entrepreneurship is management, (3) validated learning, (4) build-measure-learn, and (5) innovation accounting. While presenting these principles, the author first walks the reader through his vision that the products a startup builds are really experiments and that the outcome of these experiments is learning how to build a sustainable business. The author then examines the build-measure-learn feedback loop, the core of the Lean Startup model, and then turns his discussion to the growth of startups within this model.
The bulk of the material that Ries provides is in these first two parts. As a Six Sigma practitioner familiar with Lean, I especially appreciated how the author interwove the startup journey with Lean practices, while providing some of the historical background with which some readers might not be familiar. To a degree, some of the comments that other reviewers here have provided, however, are a demonstration of the build-measure-learn feedback loop as applied to book publishing in that readers in this space often expect detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to implement presented ideas, but doing so is not the purpose of this text.
The other common thread of criticism throughout the other reviews here is that the author concentrates on the technology space, and although I agree that he spends considerable time talking about web related businesses and agile software development, he does so because these areas are what comprise his background. And as a technology consultant, I can attest to the fact that many of the practicies discussed that started in manufacturing have been successfully adopted in the software development world. Many of these practices can be further pursued in other industries, but much of the drive has been concentrated in these two areas and so such examples are more readily available.
In his epilogue, the author reminds the reader of the Peter Drucker quote that states that "there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Ries furthers this thought by stating that "most people I meet believe that in their industry at least, projects fail for good reasons: projects are inherently risky, market conditions are unpredictable, 'big company people' are intrinsically uncreative. Some believe that if we just slowed everything down and used a more careful process, we could reduce the failure rate by doing fewer projects of higher quality. Others believe that certain people have an innate gift of knowing the right thing to build. If we can find enough of these visionaries and virtuosos, our problems will be solved."
"These 'solutions' were once state of the art in the nineteenth century, before people knew about modern management. The requirements of an ever-faster world make these antique approaches unworkable, and so the blame for failed projects and businesses often is heaped on senior management, which is asked to do the impossible. Alternatively, the finger of blame is pointed at financial investors or the public markets for overemphasizing quick fixes and short-term results. We have plenty of blame to go around, but far too little theory to guide the actions of leaders and investors alike. The Lean Startup movement stands in contrast to this hand-wringing. We believe that most forms of waste in innovation are preventable once their causes are understood. All that is required is that we change our collective mind-set concerning how this work is to be done." Well said.