Leading Lean

Foreword

A few years ago, I published my second book, The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth. It’s both an acknowledgment and an exploration of the many directions Lean Startup has traveled in beyond tech startups and Silicon Valley. Running experiments and processes such as building minimum viable products, following the build-measure-learn cycle, and metered funding have been applied to more kinds of problems than I could ever have envisioned, including in large, long-established companies that are looking to stay vital and relevant in a new world of business. On the surface, these enterprises would seem to have little in common with the other kinds of organizations in which Lean Startup has taken hold—small, newly formed startups, startups that have experienced massive growth, government entities, and nonprofits, to name just a few. But despite their differences in mission and scope, these organizations share a crucial similarity: the people who run them know that adaptability is the key to success in the 21st century.

In other words: leadership.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people trying to bring innovation to their companies. These conversations tend to go like this: employees with high-potential new ideas about how to tackle all sorts of issues—from industry-wide reinventions to societal problems or the way their company IT systems work—tell me that they have no way to act on them.

They’re ...