The Leader’s Guide by Eric Ries
Now the background to this book is an interesting one. The company I work for is owned by a larger company and we have and on/off relationship with their technology team. A couple of years ago the parent company’s tech team had started using Salesforce Chatter for Enterprise Social and we were offered to get involved. During one of the brief views of their social feed there was a post from someone with a link to Kickstarter for a new book by Eric Ries, the author of the Lean Startup. At that time, I was care-taking an Innovation Team and thought that having a book on how to lead a lean start-up approach in an Enterprise was a good thing. So I jumped on to the Kickstarter and pledged some money.
Reflecting on this, this one thing has triggered a number of things that altered what I do today. For one, as being a backer of the book, not only did we get access to the book, but we also got additional benefits. One was some content from Strategizer, as I still subscribe to their news letters today and another was a free month’s access to Safari Books Online. This ultimately lead to me subscribing to the service full-time and was the source of a number of books read during 2017. There were more opportunities including being part of a Leader’s Guide community which I didn’t fully take up.
Now, from a reading tech perspective, this was one of the first books that I’ve read using iBooks. So I’m using a mixture of Kindle on various devices, Queue, the Safari Books Online app, Audible, iBooks and standalone PDFs. And yes, I also got iOS to read me the book. I’m not sure if I used the following technique with this particular book or not, but I certainly have with others, where I read alone whilst the device read me the book. This has an interesting effect that it forces you to follow and read at a constant pace, which interestingly even when sped up, is still slower than reading in your head, but as you are reading along you don’t miss read or make mistakes also you can see the pictures and have a better sense of the context too.
Now to the book itself… as I’ve already mentioned, the core tenet of this book is how to lead Lean Startup within a large organisation. The book starts out by covering the Lean Startup approach which can be summarised as the ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ cycle. The book goes to extreme lengths to show that the Lean Startup approach can be applied to both large scale organisation and to physical products, not just software. The book relays the story of GE developing a new generation of Diesel Generators using the Lean Start-up approach. The key here was to build ‘quickly’ a new generator based on existing product, in this case a Diesel engine and then seeing if their was a market for it and the iterating a learning from this – building the minimal viable product.
The first part of the book focuses on the Lean Startup process itself, the second part of the book focuses on scaling the process to an enterprise. So, in this case, the key items are how an entrepreneurial management approach and trust builds sustainable growth, making sure that the entrepreneurs are supported within the organisation and given accountability, making sure that an idea is funded whilst it is making progress, so no large budgets and estimates and finally, experiment and get leadership buy-in and coach them in the Lean Start-up approach and change the legacy processes of the organisation,
I think I need to read this book again!
Breadth, Depth and Form 