The
Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform
Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth – Eric Ries (Currency)
Straight out of Penn State, my son took a position in
IT with a HUGE multi-national, multi-division, multi-product line corporation
that everybody knows. Being new to the work force, he was shocked at how slowly
this gargantuan corporation seemed to plod along at a glacial pace when it came
to expanding markets and introducing new products. With silos firmly entrenched
in the management structure to say that inertia has set in would be an
understatement. From their he accepted a position working for an institution of
higher education and now he longs for the comparable light speed at which his
former employers worked.
With so much media and business press focus on startups
and high tech and sprint to market, you have to wonder how so many great business
entities ever lost sight of that entrepreneurial spirit and drive, to become so
bogged down. Over the course of time we have heard the rather timid rallying
cry from business as the encourage their middle managers and frontline staff to
“take ownership” and run with ideas; only to see those folks who take that
thought process to heart, crushed under the thumb of a cumbersome management
structure.
Enter Eric Ries, the brainchild behind and author of The Lean Startup. Ries found himself at
the center of both the natural audience, those in various stages of the startup
mode and in the unnatural position of being brought in by behemoth corporations
to try to inject that lean startup spirit back into the way they do business.
This truly was a take ownership moment; why couldn’t these huge business
entities with all of their inherent tools and resources utilize the can do
spirit of a startup.
By deconstructing not only the startup process, but by breaking
down the silos and chains of command, which had turned into the shackles of
command, Ries demonstrates how this process will work no matter where you are
on the business scale. He takes the principles outlined in The Lean Startup, and takes a deeper process dive into fleshing out
how this can scale to more established and entrenched businesses, while adding
new tools to the belts of true startups.