Eric Ries, the driving force behind the “lean startup” movement, which encourages high efficiency and meticulous metrics tracking within entrepreneurial ventures. Ries … noticed a trend among some of the people attending his talks. Many managers from large companies were coming to his sessions to learn what they could, because, as Ries discovered, the principals of lean startups can exist within larger corporations that are attempting to innovate.

Thinking Inside the Box: Eric Ries On Creating Startups Within Large Organizations

Efficiency and metrics tracking – and you can’t achieve one without the other – shouldn’t be  solely the realm of the entrepreneur – they’re core to any successful business.

“The real value is [this] starts to catalyze change because by changing the way you work you start to accelerate that feedback loop [...] and that can become the basis for making other changes,” Ries says.
…
Companies could also benefit … by inspiring their existing employees to be innovative, instead of wrangling up entrepreneurs from a startup, which would save them money in the end.

photo credit: westpark

Paving the way for New Thinking helps

New ideas presented from within an organization can be met with derision, resentment and the entrenchment mentioned above – the reason there’s a consulting industry generally isn’t because  organizations don’t have the talent and ideas aboard already. In my experience, those things usually *are* there. The reason outsiders are brought in is to help those ideas get a foothold and succeed.

It’s almost unfortunate, but many times outsiders are brought in because insiders haven’t gotten it done. It’s not that they weren’t capable; it’s that they didn’t. Without assistance, there’s little to reason to believe this will change. So “fresh eyes” come in to help. Those new perspectives can be brought in even from other parts of the larger organization – the point of the exercise is to make time to think specifically about what your processes are, why they are that way, and what the team can do to improve them.

(Management) “have this idea that a certain alchemy will happen that ‘if I bring these special people into my organization, they will teach my regular people how to be special,’ and that’s just a formula for breeding resentment,” Ries told ReadWriteWeb. “If the people doing the acquiring had more of a theory about how entrepreneurship is supposed to work [...] they could start to think of better ways to plug an acquired company into the larger organization, taking advantage of what they’re good at without destroying it.”

Read more of Thinking Inside the Box

The bit about alchemy is mostly true – especially when a larger organization works to consume a smaller, more entrepreneurial organization in whole, it can create a lot of friction without creating the intended value: The good ideas both sides bring are lost to disdain.

Encouraging efficiency and the importance of metrics – “data-driven decision-making” – would improve chances of an organization actually synthesizing what an acquired team had to offer. Putting a framework around how existing team members can be innovative within the organization would make any injection of new ideas that much more welcomed and effective. Then the “fresh eyes” have their best shot at ensuring everyone’s successful.

At its best IK acts like a corporate research library devoted to the policies, practices, products and history of an organization. It is accessible, germane, trusted and utilized. It is the corporate memory and a reflection of how the institution thinks and solves problems.

As a new generation of collaboration tools begins to roll-out (Google Wave , Sharepoint 2010 and others) there’s the usual buzz going around about how these tools will allow companies to better leverage IK on projects and usher in a new age of business productivity. (cue: images of sunrise, fanfare, children playing, etc.) While it’s true that these apps may represent the latest and greatest in collaboration tools the limiting factor on their benefit to your company is likely…wait for it…your company.

You see, I think IK has value only if your company is organized around some basic precepts:

• a company CAN learn from internal history
• failure has value
• success needs formal review too
• project administration is important

If your organization doesn’t share and prioritize…institutionalize…these precepts then whatever is preserved by collaboration software will likely be wasted.

These four precepts interact with IK in some very basic and important ways. Our tendency to emphasize the differences in today’s marketplace from previous ones gives no credence to the fact that consumers (i.e. the people with the money) behave very similarly today as they did 30 years ago. Good ideas need to be remembered and periodically reviewed so that when business conditions change, they can be implemented. If your company doesn’t respect the ideation of those who went before IK tools won’t likely do as much for you as they could.

Now, in my experience, when a brilliant idea fails it’s proud-parent is rarely called upon to give a formal write-up as to why everything went South – in fact the brave soul is usually shunned, marginalized, and if the flop was big enough, rapidly terminated. This is a great way to waste IK. All of the research, documentation, assumptions, presentations, etc. should be handed over to a corporate curator, packaged, cataloged and interred in a corporate archive. The key decision-makers should be interviewed and their learnings recorded. The company spent money, usually millions, on this project and it doesn’t even want to give the project a formal burial. It’s a lost opportunity.

However, what is worse in my opinion, is when a company has a breakout success, fails to understand fully why it happened, and blithely assumes that its success was due to its brilliance rather than the marketplace. If you do not capture the IK on why something worked it can be as risky as avoiding something because it failed once.

Last, project administration; the note-taking; the meetings; the emails; the documentation; more meetings; the uploading; the versioning – project administration amounts to discipline. This is vital to utilizing IK in the future and is probably the least respected component of a successful company. Don’t confuse time worked, emails sent, presentations produced, meetings scheduled, etc. with project administration, what I refer to here is the lost art of taking all the dross of a project; filtering it to understand what happened; annotating when and why decisions were made; preserving and editing the notes…and throwing the rest away. Editing is important to the successful application of IK to new situations. If someone has to sort through a mess to learn something then not only is their time wasted but so it the effort and expense that went into collecting and storing it.

With the advent of a generational shift in collaboration tools, we are undoubtedly on the verge of a new era of workplace productivity (again). This time, when you are considering new collaboration tools give some thought to the way that you collaborate.

• Does the organization have an institutionalized approach to collaboration or are you just posting individual efforts to a glorified bulletin board?
• Are you preserving the hard-fought lessons that you are learning in a rough economy or are you just filling up space on a server and calling it productivity?

High school sports has always had the Golden Square: it’s mobile, social, real-time and local.

photo credit: Ségozyme

Who better to cover high school sports than the local papers? And the school newspapers where these athletes play? (Parents and spectators could participate, too, but we’re baby-stepping here.)

In 2007, PARADE opened up a Finalist List of high school athletes and asked the community to select their favorites. We had galleries – photos and video – that (could) feature the finalists AND write-ins: “don’t like our finalists? tell us yours.”

We built a set of tools and reached out to newspaper partners in the Finalists’ areas.  “Here. Have this.” If they used nothing else, we had links and profile pages: “Even just send us links to stories YOU’VE ALREADY WRITTEN; we’ll let the community and your peers see, vote and comment on those.”

We worked with Reddit on that last piece They’d already built great tools and made it accessible; we wanted to leverage that. We wanted to make our good ideas and web products available, without strings, to our newspaper partners. We wanted to do what we did best and link to the rest. We wanted them to share so we shared everything with them.

At the same time, an Editorial effort worked to coordinate and curate input from High School journos. For them, too, we contacted the schools who had players in a wide list of “Finalists.” This central editorial role was to help the HS journos keep info on
their players fresh and complete.They could post weekly stats, updates of player photos and footage, and any new writeups they created or found.

After the first week, when there was less-than-overwhelming participation, we began trolling partner paper sites for HS football stories. There were plenty, and plenty of good ones. We built pages of links soley out to the partners. And we asked them again – “if you use none of these other tools, send your storties here. it takes 20 seconds and, at the least, you’ll have parade.com’s exposure in addition to your own traffic.”

There were several active contributors. They loved their Finalists and worked at keeping us aware of all those players’ moves in the game, in school , and outside of those. But we weren’t able to put together a robust and complete site, for a national audience, based on the content recieved. We didn’t provide sufficient incentive for widespread and ongoing participation.

The value proposition for paper partner and HS journo participation fell short: it was difficult to sell the value gained beyond additional exposure, access to gratis tools, and the act of working on wider, more social collaboration. We had no historical numbers to point to, as this was the first time we’d taken this on; I’d presumed massive pariticpation and didn’t get it. There was no additional revenues to speak of to share with participants.

It should have worked. We had to work – all of us – within the confines of expectation. I expected it to succeed from the outset. Contributors – journalists at the partner papers and in HS – wanted to to see better returns on investment of time and effort sooner than we delivered.

With True/Slant, we’re working harder to address those challenges. We’re putting together more measurable incentives for participation. It would be interesting to see what we’ve learned – re coordinating distributed editorial resources and showing the inherent benefits of working with the community (the audience) – applied to working on a project like PARADE All-America.

2009 and 2010 will see it improve. It’s social, it’s local, and it can be real-time and mobile – it *has* to work.

Small screens, small keyboards and underpowered hardware make for a less than stellar Netbook user experience
…
users will download Jolicloud to their Netbooks and then install it. Whatever operating system and software is on the computer will be wiped off, and replaced with a stripped down Linux operating system and custom browser.

Asterisk@Home – now Trixbox – does this and it’s a great way to experience the product when you’ve got a machine you can wipe clean. Are netbook folks going to do that? What’s their recourse if they decide to go back?

photo credit: geognerd

Between GNU, Linux, the BSDs and a host of supporting tools, it’s hard to imagine why you’d tailor a specialized OS atop something you couldn’t completely get to, understand, update. And there, too, it’s great but tough to go against Apple’s phone running OS X. There’s freedom to build and then building excellence.  They’re not at all mutually exclusive. It can be tough to keep it going beyond scratching an itch, but overnight success generally takes awhile and the money to do it. It seems mobile platforms that have worked have had a tight coupling with Another Machine with easier access, additional apps, more juice. Is a part of Netbooks’ Being hooking into something else and syncing? What gets synced? (docs, photos, drawings?)

With Apple’s phone and OS, you’re connected almost always (sans where AT&T’s shitty network bites you … but they’re working on it with available WiFi), and still you hook up to your laptop or workstation and do a lot more. Palms, the Audrey, the ipod, and iphone – Netbook?

photo credit: viZZZual.com

Most parking meters are now computers. Even in small towns, the computers now dispense tickets, read magnetic stripes, and help meter maids make quotas.

The machines have to be serviced by technicians specifically trained. There’s software, hardware, networking. I’ve seen the insides of MetroCard machines far more often than I recall watching them emptying turnstiles, much less fixing them.

How much value can these newer machines add to these situations? How much more does the sleepy municipality realize with computers than they did with cogs, knobs and nickels?

Technology needs to be applied situationally and with care. Presuming the newer machines were put in place to improve things, how much improvement have they brought?

Most processes in your business can be improved: everything from pulling info from email to getting the merger docs you need can be streamlined. Taking care to improve processes without upsetting what’s made them work – presuming they do – is where experience and good sense count.

Situations where a given solution is beneficial for a specific principal can theoretically happen, too.  Accounting for this is another part of the vetting process. Solutions that cost a lot have a tendency not to fail: they’re not allowed to, as they’re too expensive to allow it. Bad money after good is not just for poker.

If you’re considering a solution that weds you long-term to a specific vendor, consider that well. A bunch of companies made turnstiles; there’s likely just one making all the MetroCard machines. They can charge what they like for the machine itself as well as the services around it.

Changing of process is almost always unwelcome, so input from the people who do work in your process is important. Even the good one’s aren’t going to like change much, but if they’re good, they’ll appreciate a good solution. If part of that means your good peoples’ participation, then involving them early and often works well.

Who do you suppose tested the new parking meters and turnstiles?