Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

2Stories of Your Life and Others

Discover the Business Lifecycle of startups and scaleups and reflect on exploration, execution, and Product/Market Fit.

 

The idea for my startup was born in Union Square Park in New York. It was summer 2016. I was on tour in the United States to promote Managing for Happiness, my previous book, and I was sitting on a park bench, minding my own business, and doing a bit of reading. Around me in the park were people from all over the world, with different languages, clothes, hairstyles, skin colors, and body modifications. However, everyone was playing the same game on their smartphones: Pokémon Go. It was absurd. Hundreds of strangers were walking around with their phones, trying to catch invisible monsters. I had never witnessed a global hype of that scale before. I thought the world had gone mad.

Then something clicked in my head. I thought, “As business coaches, consultants, and trainers, we do our best to get people in organizations to change their behaviors. It can take years for just a few hundred employees to fully adopt agile and lean practices because organizational change is hard. And yet, within just a few weeks, millions of people are playing Pokémon Go. Isn’t that behavioral change, too? How did the game’s creators manage to achieve that so quickly? It’s unfair!”

 

I realized that organizational change is often hindered because it’s ...