The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

"I call The Lean Startup the Bible of the modern entrepreneur. And I say that tongue-in-cheek because I’m sure five years from now we’ll have a new Bible. But I think it’s a very good book—a very useful book—and it tells you how to start a company using this ‘lean startup’ methodology. Eric Ries wrote it up very well. There were several people around him who were developing this methodology as well. This is not rocket science. It’s very straightforward: build-measure-learn. Basically, it says do something, try it out, and learn from it. That process is incredibly powerful, but it turns out that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t do it, or at least don’t do it properly. Eric Ries makes a very simple case for why you should do it and how you should do it. So I give this book to every entrepreneurship student. Most of them are familiar with it—there’s a whole industry around the ‘lean startup’. You can find tons of webpages, books, courses and all sorts of other things. “I call The Lean Startup the Bible of the modern entrepreneur” It has got some limitations, and that’s why I’m sure five years from now we’ll have a new Bible. Eric Ries comes out of the software world, where some of these methods work particularly well. I think the lean startup works well for the vast majority of companies that have very identifiable targets that can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. But there’s a big question about whether it works for the really long-shots. A lot of science-driven and long-term innovation companies will find the details of the Lean Startup difficult. An exercise I give to my class involves familiarising the students with the concept of the lean startup and then going back to Steve Jobs and asking them whether he used the lean startup. And the conclusion is generally, no, he didn’t. He didn’t use the methodology that Eric Ries did, although you can have an interesting debate about that. Steve Jobs also did some things that Eric Ries says you shouldn’t do. So, I think there remains some healthy controversy about which 80 per cent of this book is true. Exactly. Eric Ries doesn’t point this out but—and as a university professor I cannot help saying this—actually, he rediscovered the scientific method for entrepreneurs. The scientific method is: make a hypothesis, test it, validate it, and then figure out why it works the way it works and when it works and when it doesn’t. It’s actually very consistent with the way we teach people to think in a university. I think the beauty of Eric Ries is also that it’s not just about thinking, it’s about doing—as a scientist and, to some extent, as an entrepreneur. Yes, that’s music to my ears because I work in a business school! I think some people have a narrow interpretation of management and think of line management or general management and say that entrepreneurs themselves are not managing. But if you don’t have that specific notion of management then, yes, entrepreneurship is about managing a whole set of activities. “Think of entrepreneurs as generalists. They sometimes call them jack-of-all-trades. As an entrepreneur, you’re responsible for everything” I think the complementary piece to this is to think of entrepreneurs as generalists. They sometimes call them jack-of-all-trades. As an entrepreneur, you’re responsible for everything. In that sense, you’re managing because you’re putting the whole project together and you’re responsible for everything."