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Advice to Startups: How to Build Companies that Matter

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Eric Ries has a great article on how to build companies that matter, based on a model that he calls the lean startup.

The way for the lean startup approach has been paved by recent technological innovations such as web 2.0 and has been made even more relevant by the current economic crisis.

Here’s the intro:

We’re living in a time of renewed possibility for startups. Major trends – from the pain of the economic crisis to the disruption of web 2.0 – are breaking the old models and paving the way for a new breed of company. I call it the Lean Startup.

The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to building companies that matter. It’s designed to dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning. It requires dramatically less capital than older models, and can find profitability sooner. Most importantly, it breaks down the artificial dichotomy between pursuing the company’s vision and creating profitable value. Instead, it harnesses the power of the market in support of the company’s long-term mission.

Tim O’Reilly has recently been advocating that as an industry we focus on building stuff that matters. In response, I want to try and present a way of building startups that can realize that dream. In particular, he as articulated three principles:

(1) Work on something that matters to you more than money, (2) Create more value than you capture, and (3) Take the long view.

Ries then goes on to present an approach for startups that builds on those principles.

Six Thinking Hats

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Mindtools has a good overview of a decision-making tool called the Six Thinking Hats. This tool helps improve your decision making by enabling you to look at a decision from all angles.

“Six Thinking Hats” is a powerful technique that helps you look at important decisions from a number of different perspectives. It helps you make better decisions by pushing you to move outside your habitual ways of thinking. As such, it helps you understand the full complexity of a decision, and spot issues and opportunities which you might otherwise not notice.

The hats are:

  • White hat: focus on the data available.
  • Red hat: look at the decision using intuition and emotion.
  • Black hat: look at things pessimistically [my least favorite! — but it will help make your plans tougher].
  • Yellow hat: look at things optimistically.
  • Green hat: look at things creatively.
  • Blue hat: this stands for control, which means directing attention to the most needed hat when circumstances require. For example, if ideas run dry, directing focus to the green hat, or directing focus to the black hat when it’s time to create contingency plans.

For more details and examples, read the whole thing.

The Truly Creative Do Not Just Generate Ideas — They Implement

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A very good point by Steven Furtick, via Zach Nielsen: 

Let’s define creative. Cause it seems like to me that the way we often use the term in church work today misses the point.

Some people fancy themselves as being “creative,” or ”creative-types,” because they have a lot of ideas. Cool. You have ideas.
So does my 3 year old.
That doesn’t make you creative.
An idea without implementation isn’t creation.
It’s imagination.

By definition, being creative requires that you create something.
True creative people don’t just dream it — they do it…or oversee the strategy to get it done.
True creativity results in a product. Not just an idea.

We’ve all met people who shy away from the hard work of action steps because they “don’t do the details.” They’re “more into the creative side of things.”
But as far as I can tell, the Chief Creator didn’t just think about light, stars, and human life…the proof of His creativity is the tangible detailed expression of His vision.

That’s what I appreciate so much about our creative team at Elevation.
They imagine — then they implement.
Otherwise, they know they’d just be playing make believe.
And we don’t give paychecks to big boys and girls for playing make believe.

What will you create today?
Don’t settle for conceptualization. Bring it into existence.

Simply having great ideas does not make you creative. By definition, being truly creative means you actually create something. So there are really two components of creativity. As a semi-motto of GTD that I’ve seen goes: “Make it up, make it happen.“

Where Social Networking is Going

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TechCrunchIT has a good Q&A on the social web with Google’s Kevin Marks. Right away, his comments on the first question are very significant:

Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean?

Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction.

But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing. In the future, we expect everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web.

I call this the “social cloud,” meaning that “social” will be integrated with the web so that you don’t think about it anymore. Charlene Li calls this same idea “social networks become like air.” The web itself is like this — following links seems like second nature to us because we know a URL can take us anywhere. Social isn’t there yet, but that’s the highest level goal of the OpenSocial project — to make interacting with people a natural part of how we use the web.

Read the whole thing.

Upside Downturn

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Creativity Online has a helpful and engaging interview with some folks on where creativity stands and the role it can play during these challenging economic times. Here are three key excerpts:

Sure, times are tough, but history has shown that recessions can lead to innovation and enlightened ways of thinking. Here, creatives reflect on opportunities to be mined on the tough road ahead. Additionally, we present some of the most brilliant breakthroughs to come out during financial slumps.

….

The campaigns that I am most proud of had little or no budget. When you have no money, the idea has to be fantastic.

….

Lots of marketers will be under pressure to reduce their budgets. Now, that’s not a great idea because, as The Economist and many others have pointed out: (a) you still have to sell into a down economy (probably harder) and (b) if the competition is pulling back it’s an opportunity to take more of the conversation. But let’s take budget pressure as a reality. You’re a big marketer and you can spend $3 million dollars on 30 seconds in the season finale of Lost. Or you can spend $1.5 million doing something digital that provides conversation value, social value, function. You can do something as or more effective with a lot less money, because digital doesn’t usually carry the same cost of production process and bloat that big splash TV does. That doesn’t mean that spending half as much online makes you twice as smart. You have to use that half of your budget thoughtfully. That’s where creativity and innovation comes in.

How to Negotiate in a Way that Produces Two Winners, and No Losers

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Alex Chediak has written a very helpful article on negotiation which has just been posted at Boundless. Alex points out that the goal is to pursue a win-win agreement — that is, two winners, and no losers. This means that we should pursue principled negotiation rather than positional negotiation.

Here are his four main points:

  1. Separate the people from the problem.
  2. Negotiation on the basis of objective merits, not subjective preferences.
  3. Brainstorm creatively to identify mutually beneficial solutions.
  4. Know when to walk away.

A helpful source for the article was the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which I highly recommend. If you read one book on negotiation, that’s the book to read.

And, with this, remember that negotiation is not only a “big event” that happens only once in a while, such as when you buy a car or a house. These principles are relevant every day in many different ways. And we are often participating in “mini-negotiations” throughout the day without even knowing it.

Don’t Skip that Page

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Excellent thoughts today from Seth Godin. In an era where all the highlights from everything are so easily available, it can be very, very easy to forget this:

The top of a mountain is rarely the best part.

You can watch “the good parts” of a baseball game in about six minutes. The web has become a giant highlights reel… the best parts of SNL, the best parts of a speech, the best parts of a book.

We can skim really fast now. This is a problem for marketers, because it means that if they don’t make the good parts easily findable and accessible (and bold and loud and memorable) then the whole product becomes invisible.

As consumers of information, though, I wonder if the best parts are really the best parts. Yes, you can read a summary of a book instead of a book, or watch the trailer instead of the movie, or read the executive summary of the consultant’s report instead of the whole thing… but the parts you miss are there for a reason.

Real change is rarely caused by the good parts. Real change and impact and joy come from the foundation and the transitions and the little messages that sneak in when you least expect them. The highlights of the baseball game are highlights largely because the rest of the game got you ready for them.

Don’t skip that page, it’s there for a reason.

One more thought: In his management book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham talks about how there are several stages to building an excellent work environment. Here’s what’s interesting: you can’t just skip to the final stage. If you do, you will fail. The stages leading up to that are the necessary preparation.

Mountain climbers know this well. As Buckingham states: “To reach the summit you have to pay your dues — if you just helicopter to camp 3 and rise to the summit, experienced guides know you will never make it. Mountain sickness will sap your energy and slow your progress to a crawl.”

The same is true with information and most things in life: If all we ever seek out and engage with are the highlights, the end result is going to be mountain sickness.

How to Stifle Innovation

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According to ZDNet, the above video was “prepared by NASA engineers to demonstrate the problems in any large bureaucracy that values requirements over new ideas, and process over [initiative].” It’s about ten minutes long, but the point is well made within the first two minutes.

How to Keep Up with 24 Business Books a Year

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For the last several years, I’ve been a subscriber to Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries. Each month, you get two summaries of some of the most important and latest business books. The summaries come in both audio form (either CD or, I think, MP3 download) and in written transcripts (by email).

Each summary is about 45 minutes, and they actually summarize the content very, very well. So for a time investment of about 1.5 hours per month, you can keep up with 24 business books per year.

This post is not an advertisement — nobody asked me to write this. I have simply found this to be a helpful tool which some of you might be interested in exploring. I think the cost is about $150/year.

One point to keep in mind: Don’t expect to fully absorb the content in only 1.5 hours a month. If you want to truly think over and remember the content, it will take additional review of the transcripts and just plain reflecting on the content. I view this program as a way to stay briefed on new books, and then go deeper on the few that seem most useful.

Here’s a summary from their site:

Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries are carefully written summations of the best business books published each year. They are recorded on audio CDs or cassettes, plus word-for-word e-transcripts.

Each audio summary is 45 minutes in length, much shorter than the average of 10 to 15 hours required to thoroughly read and comprehend most truly important business books. They enable subscribers to turn the “downtime” of commuting, travel or exercise, into profitable “uptime.” A subscription to Business Book Summaries is a productive alternative to the radio or cellular phone.

The 24 books summarized each year are selected by our Editorial Board from nearly 3,000 new titles examined. The Audio-Tech Editorial Board is composed of Harvard Business School Graduates, Fortune 500 senior executives and internationally known management consultants. Each is an expert in one or more of the subject areas we cover.

Our professional writers and editors carefully summarize the books under the watchful eyes of Editorial Board Members.

Last of all, here’s a business idea for anyone so inclined: This would be a good thing to do for the latest books in Christian publishing. I bet a lot of pastors and people in ministry would appreciate being able to keep up with about 2 books a month through well-done audio and written summaries. The business model for such a company would not be hard to spell out.

But the books chosen for summarizing would need to be good. None of that fluffy, boring, useless stuff that so often finds its way into Christian bookstores. Also, I would recommend not limiting the summaries to new books. It would be helpful maybe for 1 of the summaries each month to be new, and 1 of the summaries to be a solid, classic work from church history (Edwards, Luther, Owen, Augustine, etc.), as well as more recent classics such as Packer’s Knowing God.

Present Like Steve Jobs

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BNET has a good 7-minute video on giving better presentations called Present Like Steve Jobs. “While most speakers merely convey information, Jobs inspires.”

Here are the main points:

  1. Unveil a single headline that sets the theme. For example, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”
  2. Provide the outline. For example, “I’ve got four things I’d like to talk to you about today. They are …”
  3. Open and close each section with a transition in between. Make it easy for listeners to follow your story, letting your outline serve as guideposts along the way.
  4. Don’t be stiff and formal. Have fun and be excited about your company, product, service.
  5. If you offer numbers and statistics, make them meaningful. For example, don’t just say “we’ve sold 4 million iPhones to date.” Say, “that’s 20,000 each day since it was released.”
  6. Make it visual. Don’t fill your slides with mind-numbing text and charts. Paint a picture for your audience without overwhelming them. Use video clips, demonstrations, and guests.
  7. Identify your memorable moment and build up to it.
  8. Rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more.
  9. Give your audience an added bonus to walk away with. “One more thing …”