Review of 'The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
I learned a lot Ries' first book the Lean Startup and thought it brought some great practices together. The Startup Way aims to apply those Lean Startup ideas to major corporations using GE as a case study.
I found chapters 3-5 to be the strongest.
The gap Ries leaves is for startups who have lost their way because they were initially successful and have grown past a two pizza team size. The entrepreneurial and risk taking takes a back seat to scaling and normalizing.
For a startup that's grown it's good to review the chapter 3 qualities of the start up way: team focus, customer focus, employees given a stake (ESOP), leading indicators (engagements, conversions not revenue, profitability), meter funding (when does taking another round become a bad thing?), meritocracy, mission driven, and entrepenurialism as a career.
If your startup doesn't have these attributes teams then your not moving forward …
I learned a lot Ries' first book the Lean Startup and thought it brought some great practices together. The Startup Way aims to apply those Lean Startup ideas to major corporations using GE as a case study.
I found chapters 3-5 to be the strongest.
The gap Ries leaves is for startups who have lost their way because they were initially successful and have grown past a two pizza team size. The entrepreneurial and risk taking takes a back seat to scaling and normalizing.
For a startup that's grown it's good to review the chapter 3 qualities of the start up way: team focus, customer focus, employees given a stake (ESOP), leading indicators (engagements, conversions not revenue, profitability), meter funding (when does taking another round become a bad thing?), meritocracy, mission driven, and entrepenurialism as a career.
If your startup doesn't have these attributes teams then your not moving forward and your becoming a big company on a small scale. Breaking out of this is where Ries could be helpful, but he goes back to GE.
Chapter 4 is a nice review of Lean Startup - start with leap of faith assumptions, use MVP and Validated, Learning to get a Pivot or Perserve point. I found Sprint better at explaining this process see my review here: medium.com/@Dave.Nash.33/forget-failing-fast-and-start-sprinting-smart-ddb6ed30251b
Chapter 5 talks about how to add accountability, process, culture and people to the start up way. On page 126 of the hard cover Ries has a diagram of the startup way that infuses traditional and start up org charts and includes entrepreneurialism as a function like marketing or accounting. This was the peak of the book for me.
So is the rest helpful? Only at a major corporation with huge management buy-in. Even GE - peaked last year at $32 and right now is in free fall down to $14 in market that's up 30% its down 50%. Imelt was a forward thinking CEO and HBR did a nice write up of how he improved GE in the September 2017 issue. It's good they did that then because now GE doesn't look so hot. I don't claim to be an expert in GE but that hurts the long term story for Ries.