The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

Acknowledgments

How does one write an acknowledgments section without it sounding like an Academy Awards acceptance speech? One probably can’t. Yet this section is important to us, because without these individuals the book would not have been possible.

Unlike with the Academy Awards, when you might turn the channel once you know who’s won an award, you should read this section. Why? Because they are people whom you should know or want to know. They are people who are doing things, people who are changing the world.

First off, we’d like to thank our editors at Wiley, Laura Walsh and Judy Howarth. One often hears horror stories about editors, and though they’re always thanked in the end, the acknowledgment is often buried. This book is about disruption, and there’s no better case study of an industry being turned on its head than book publishing. Laura gets this. She is forward thinking, open to new ideas, and infinitely patient. Note to Wiley: Promote Laura.

The most common question we get from frustrated intrapreneurs who see their efforts at real innovation inside their large organizations continuously thwarted is “How do we convince senior management to adopt lean startup principles?” We always have one answer: “Buy Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup. Ries’s book is, hands down, the best way for big business to understand why they need to turn their continuously thwarting organization into a continuous learning one. Thank you, Eric, for leading the change and for supporting our ...