“Measure twice, cut once” is an attractive rule to live by if you are a multi-billion dollar company. There is a lot to lose. The problem with doing this in a startup is that we build something that no one wants in our minds, research papers and specification documents that we then avoid changing when the truth comes home.
Big companies need new business models and, with the pace of disruption today, need to create, validate (or otherwise) and scale them faster than ever.
Startups can help with this because this is their natural habitat. In the same way that school children are ‘digital natives’, a startup lives in a world where ‘normal’ is uncertain. It requires that uncertainty is managed into certainty. In startups we accept that failure is most likely, that all we have is unproven and that everything might change. But, in spite of that, we start. Thought becomes action and valuable new businesses emerge.
The work itself is not random. It is as disciplined as a telco working to increase margins by 10%. To compete, startups have developed a science of entrepreneurship. A ‘craft’ if you like. It is a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of working. We have tools and a repeatable discipline that is action driven and feeds off early and frequent customer encounters so that we out-learn the competition.
Big companies can forge startups too because this practice can be shared. We hold by these principles for startups in big companies:
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Thought through action.
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Work outside day to day operations to build autonomous startups.
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Leverage assets of big company at the right time, but not before.
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Accept that the business will change as it grows. Control through resource limitation not what the business can be.
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Foster “emotional labour” and “skin in the game”
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Accept 1 in 10 failure. Use process and data for risk management.
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Alignment up, down and across the company. Evangelists. Openness. Ideas. Community.
Big companies don’t need to bet the farm. They just need a process to unlock the imagination of their teams to build lean startups from within. This is how we will invent the future. Stop thinking. Start.