RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

startups

  • According to Kurzweil, “the Singularity is near,” it’s inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it.

    But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won’t happen on its own. What the Singularity would look like matters less than the stark choice we face today between the two most likely scenarios: nothing or something. It’s up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

    Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us — the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment — is singular. Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1.

    The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • So, what do we call this work of “evolving” an organization to become better adapted to the world in which it finds itself? A lot of best practices for reorganization fall under the general heading of change management. But this particular evolution requires something different. I’ve struggled over the years to explain why this change in particular is so difficult, so all-consuming, that it requires a special sort of person to pull it off. It requires:

    • Leadership skills of a most distinctive kind, since transformation pits its leader against the hostile reactions of experienced people whose lives and careers are deeply invested in the status quo.
    • Audacious experimentation, since beyond the general framework I’ve presented so far, every organization has to find its own distinctive shape, its own unique adaptations to the specific context in which it operates.
    • The boldness to invest in sweeping, company-wide change—and the patience to wait until just the right moment to make this commitment. The discipline to start with small experiments that might hasten the arrival of the right moment without growing too big, too bloated, too fast.
    • The most difficult kind of cross-functional collaboration: enlisting functional leaders in the creation of new and competing functions, thereby breaking down old functional silos and requiring old enemies to make common cause.

    But after all that backbreaking effort — it may not work. There are so many, many ways to fail: executive sponsors who get cold feet, market shifts or changes, competing internal reorganizations, a coordinated counterattack from powerful enemies within the company, and, most important, shifts in external competition and market conditions that can disrupt even the best-laid plans.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • This is the true promise of the Startup Way: a management system that contains within it the seeds of its own evolution by providing an opportunity for every employee to become an entrepreneur. In doing so, it creates opportunities for leadership and keeps the people best suited for leadership in the company, reduces the waste of both time and energy and creates a system for solving challenges with speed and flexibility, all of which lead to better financial outcomes. But the most important use of the Startup Way isn’t to create better and more profitable companies. It’s to serve as a system for building a more inclusive and innovative society.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Continuous transformation—an organization’s capability to test and learn from experiments having to do with its own structure and processes, promoting the best-proven techniques company-wide while limiting or discarding the rest—is what will give that organization the ability to thrive in the modern era. It’s my last suggestion as an addition to the toolbox of the entrepreneurial management function.

    Let’s formalize and systematize that approach so that we build up a critical mass of like-minded entrepreneurs who can tackle the full heterogeneous range of challenges we’re likely to face in the twenty-first century and beyond.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Innovation Accounting (IA) is a way of evaluating progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are effectively zero.

    • It provides a framework of chained leading indicators, each of which predicts success. Each link in the chain is essential and, when broken, demands immediate attention.
    • It’s a focusing device for teams, keeping their attention on the most important leap-of-faith assumptions.
    • It’s a common, mathematical vocabulary for negotiating the use of resources among competing functions, divisions, or regions.
    • It provides a way to tie long-term growth and R&D into a system that follows a clear process for funding innovation that can be audited for its ability to drive value creation.

    Innovation accounting enables apples-to-apples comparisons between two or more startups, in order to evaluate which is most worthy of continuing investment. This is a way of seeing a startup or innovation project as a formal financial instrument, an “innovation option” 3 if you will, one that has a precise value and reflects a range of future costs and financial outcomes.

    Innovation accounting is a system for translating from the vague language of “learning” to the hard language of dollars. It puts a price not just on success but also on information.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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