Rapid Innovation Group blog

Thoughts on the Lean Startup Cult: 'Not Just Two Guys in a Garage'

I’ll be honest: I haven’t read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Guilty, I know.

I could make excuses – I’m new to the tech scene, I don’t have the time, whatever – but they probably aren’t valid. Nonetheless, I don’t live in a cave, so I am of course familiar with Ries’s basic premise and how terribly revolutionary it is and how we all have to live lean and pivot or die.

And so I arrive last night at Mark Littlewood and the Business Leader Network’s event featuring Eric Ries.

I tumble into the Mermaid conference centre all bundled up from the cold, receive my free, and disappointingly unsigned copy, of The Lean Startup (really, I have no excuses now) and am ushered upstairs to receive my free drink. Standing in the crowded bar, I begin to feel somewhat uneasy in a way that has nothing to do with my cheap glass of white wine. We are all huddled about, desperately clutching our brand new books (to replace our dog-eared copies at home, I presume). There is a tangible buzz in the air about the prophet come down from the mountain (or up from the Valley?) to share the Word with us mere mortals.

It feels a bit like a cult religion conference, and I’m not sure if group sing-alongs and matching t-shirts are my scene.

The auditorium opens for seating, with Kylie Minogue’s timeless classic, ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, providing the background music as the seats fill up. On stage, Eric Ries takes a photo of Mark Littlewood who takes a photo of Eric taking a photo of the crowd, and everyone tweets about how exciting it all is. If I had a smartphone, I would probably do the same.

There is a very postmodern self-awareness of the whole buzz around #LeanStartup. In his opening remarks, Mark makes a pointed jibe about the overabundance of Lean Startup events and the surrounding noise on the Twittosphere as Eric undertakes his European book tour. Eric himself explicitly comments on the risks of ‘entrepreneurship [as] a “hot” and “cool” topic’. His smoothly-executed presentation is followed by an interview with Mark, which in turn is followed by Q&A session with the audience, who are invited to come on to the stage for a bit of public group counselling.

The healing is nowhere near as entertaining as Eric’s exorcisms on ‘This Week in Startups’. At this point the event starts to drag, and following the lead of many others making a not-so-subtle exit from the theatre, my colleagues and I decide we’ve had our fill.

I leave with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I think Lean is great. It makes sense. Eric presents it well and seems like a credible and genuinely nice guy.

On the other, I don’t know if I’m ready to become an evangelist. I find myself reticent to dive headfirst into a concept which seems to swirl around itself in a media-fuelled hurricane, where Lean is said so often that it seems to lose all meaning.

And that is the risk – that the meaning, the good stuff at the heart of Lean, becomes lost in the structures that build themselves around it. There is a conflict in that the author is very much alive in the personality cult that fuels much of people's draw towards Lean, and yet he is also dead in the Barthesian sense as his original message becomes divorced from the infinitesimal ways in which it is communicated. The core meaning of Lean is left open to be transmuted into a chimera of tweets and blogs and guest editorials and public speaking slots that bear no resemblance to the original idea. We criticise the personality cult for its shallow overemphasis on the individual, while at the same time, this overexposure can lead to the creation of a disfiguring pastiche of the original meaning of that individual’s message.

Following a comment I made on Twitter, Mark was quick to bring to my attention that the on-stage cult-esque aspects of #BLNLean were all done tongue-in-cheek. I understand that fully – the awkward, self-conscious recognition of Lean’s celebrity status is laudable. However, I wonder where the line will be drawn between parody and reality, something which is entirely out of the author’s control and firmly in the hands of the masses and the media. The danger is in losing the embarrassing sense of self-awareness of the phenomenon that has sprung up around Eric Ries’s book; it is in watching the concept wind its way into a mirror hall, where all we can see are reflections of The Lean Startup’s cover and can no longer locate its original sense.

Eric highlighted the importance of making entrepreneurship ‘boring’. But how do we do that when all we can hear from all sides is how entrepreneurship is the answer to all our economic and personal woes? Can the cycle of narcissistic navel-gazing be broken?

To quote Eric, ‘the future of our economic growth will depend upon the quality of our collective imagination’. Maybe my concerns are unfounded – maybe the spin-off from all the hype around Lean will be further iterations of the idea, so that it is an evolving concept that avoids stagnation or parody. But unless we keep in mind the core values of imagination and innovation, we are in danger of becoming a cog in the turning gear of postmodern vacuity developing around the buzz word of entrepreneurship.

The Personal Brand Wheel

As we were discussing current renovations to our company website, our director began talking about ways to define each person’s individual expertise and area of focus. What’s your brand? Answering the question directly poses significant challenges. It’s a bit like being asked, “What’s your culture?” There’s no simple answer to the question, but an accurate answer can be obtained through a roundabout series of questions that hit upon component parts. In other words, one can arrive at an answer by looking at sources that make up a specialisation or brand.

Out of this discussion, the Personal Brand Wheel emerged on our whiteboard. The Personal Brand Wheel is a guide for establishing each consultant’s personal sphere of expertise and desired clientele:

The wheel is really designed for those who already have extensive experience and have learned about their own preferences and working styles from that experience.

It can be used to assess the fit of a new or potential client with the established personal brand of each consultant. Will it be a good match? What are the issues to look out for? Is there perhaps someone else who would be better suited to working with this particular client on the basis of preferences and style?

RIG is a knowledge- and people-based business. While process is important, RIG understands the importance of matching people and working styles. At the end of the day, business comes down to people, so understanding each consultant’s expertise, preferences, style, and ambitions helps streamline the company as a whole and ultimately perform better services for RIG’s clients.

Why I started Rapid Innovation Group

We recently sat down with Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of RIG, to talk about the company’s beginnings and his evolving thoughts on working with entrepreneurs.

Why did you start RIG?

"There are essentially three capabilities involved in starting a high growth technology company: solving a real problem for a customer; designing and building something that addresses it; and then taking the product to market.

"I’m not good at the whole equation. I am not a technologist or a product person. I’m interested in taking products to market, products that solve the right problem, by which I mean a problem that really matters to the customer and that they will willingly pay to resolve. 

"So when I started this project I wanted to create a specialist firm that was focused on the unique set of challenges that affect early stage, potentially scalable technology companies.

"The challenge was to find a business model that would enable us to develop and retain the expertise necessary to tackle these early stage issues, and in that way, RIG is quite innovative.

"I have never really considered working for someone else as a serious option. I like the freedom to create. That is what is important."

Has your view on working with entrepreneurs has changed since you started RIG?

"I value blind faith and passion less. I appreciate much more the virtues of systematic business building and risk mitigation simply because I know that if more entrepreneurial companies adopted this type of approach, the probability of their success would be much higher.

"A lot of success still has more to do with luck – being in the right place at the right time – than it has with design. Passion is a pre-requisite but it is overrated as a prime driver of success. Lots of people are passionate – that doesn’t mean they are successful.

"Learning and the ability to iterate are far more important. Being an entrepreneur implies taking a risk but the smart entrepreneur is the one who knows how to limit and reduce risk."

Information is Free, Knowledge is Expensive, Wisdom is Priceless

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to hear some of the speakers from the event “Silicon Valley Comes to the UK” in Cambridge. Several of the speakers talked of the amazing possibilities opening up with the availability of large data sets that effectively index information, language, and the world itself. It got me thinking about the nature of information, knowledge, and wisdom, and my thoughts turned, of course, to the old giant Vafþrúðnir (Vaf-thruth-neer).

In the Old Norse poem Vafþrúðnismál (Vaf-thruth-nis-maul)—The Sayings of Vafþrúðnir—the god Óðin (O-thin) comes to the giant Vafþrúðnir in disguise. Both are powerful figures in body and mind, but Óðin challenges Vafþrúðnir not to a contest of strength, but to one of wisdom.

The giant agrees, but it is his hall and his rules. They set the terms of the competition: he who loses the battle of wisdom shall forfeit his head. The cultural implications of this wager are great. Strength without wisdom is useless; the strong fool is as good as dead.

The giant does not know, of course, that he battles against Óðin, and is therefore doomed to fail. But Óðin finds a dauntless opponent in the giant as he crafts riddle after riddle, and must win in a rather sneaky way. He asks a question to which only he knows the answer: What did Óðin whisper into the ear of Baldr when he was laid on the funeral pyre? Upon hearing the question, the giant realises that his opponent must be Óðin, for only Óðin would know the answer to this question. Aware of his error, he concedes defeat.

In the Q&A period after the final session of the Silicon Valley Comes to the UK conference, one person asked about what skill-set will be required in the coming years of computer-based living as opposed to the skill-sets cultivated in years past.

The first answer came from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who said that memory and memorizing would no longer be necessary, and instead people would only need to know how to navigate data and find the information they need in the moment. Delivered to an audience largely comprised of current Cambridge students, this answer did not seem to sit well with the crowd.

After a brief, half-hearted challenge from Megan Smith at Google, Andrew McLaughlin of Civic Commons championed the opposition to Hoffman, saying that no matter how readily available information and data in the coming years may become, nothing can match the human being’s ability to integrate and synthesize information into something newer and better. Memorizing, he said, would still be important not for mechanical recollection of facts, but for the pathways it opens up in the human mind that facilitate true growth, unmatched by any program or computer.

The response received loud applause from the audience. Without the processes that real learning initialises within an individual, what purpose do the advancements in data storage and processing actually present mankind? Information has always been free. Everything we know as a species we have learned through observation, exploration, and experimentation. The information has always been there; we just needed eyes to see it, like Newton beneath the apple tree. The effort required to unearth and organise that information, however, speaks to the costliness of knowledge. Knowledge is not just about possessing information, but also about possessing methods and means of storing, processing, and using that information. It requires action. Owning an encyclopedia is useless if one never reads it, much like the uncut pages of the books in Gatsby’s library. Information is just potential, useless unless developed into knowledge, and then used with knowledge. 

And then we get to wisdom. Wisdom is yet another step further, a kind of combination of knowledge and experience that transcends the articulable. Knowledge can be traded, bought, sold, and passed on; wisdom must be developed within each and every person individually. Knowledge is also limited to a specific subject area, whereas wisdom applies across the range of human experience. And that is precisely why no matter how advanced data processing and applications become in the years ahead, they ultimately have nothing to do with the internal advancement of each human being that makes life worth living.

Wisdom will always be our rarest and most expensive commodity. In our quest to explore the applications of data, we must be sure we do not neglect the importance of wisdom and lose our heads like the giant Vafþrúðnir.

"Kodak failed because they weren't able to innovate"

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School where he leads the Business Model Innovation theme. Having worked earlier in his career as Head of Innovation and Strategy at a software start up, we talked to him about his experience of working in a growth stage company and his transition into academia.  

Becoming (in)credible

As a recent graduate working with start ups (not infrequently run by people who would themselves be considered ‘young’ in the corporate world), I think credibility is one of the biggest issues a young professional comes up against. The trouble with credibility, and this is by no means a new problem, is that it has historically been associated with age and experience; a 22-year-old is thereby automatically less credible than an older counterpart.

However, social media has changed the nature of the credibility question. Anyone who takes 15 seconds to do a Google search for me can easily discover the year I finished university and when I started work; it’s not an enormous leap from there to deduce my age and experience. Maybe that’s my fault for having an uncommon name, but I think the point holds true on a broader scale given the extreme potential for tracking just about anyone through tools like stalkbook and StalkedIn. Trying to conceal your age or relatively little professional experience is simply not possible in overcoming the credibility gap. Coupled with the awkward selfies and angst-ridden blogs lurking out there for those of us who went through adolescence on Myspace and Bebo, social media can seem like a young professional’s worst enemy.

We all know the value of being seen as reliable and able to deliver: it is the key to being taken seriously as a professional and the ‘+1’ factor in networking. The trouble is actually getting to be credible. Although social media might sometimes be a hindrance, it can also be turned to the advantage of the young professional. Credibility hinges on trustworthiness and expertise, both of which can be developed by purposefully building an online presence.

We must firstly be constantly aware of the fact that anything we do on the internet could become public knowledge. I have a hard time viewing as credible anyone I don’t personally know whose social network settings allow me to see photos of them on the lash in Ibiza. That’s not to say I don’t believe in having a laugh, but slack privacy makes people appear somehow less professionally trustworthy. This seems like an obvious point, but as a recruitment manager who makes a habit of checking out all applicants on facebook, it apparently isn’t.

Blogs and Twitter can provide the means for establishing referable expertise, so long as you are addressing the people you want to hear you about relevant issues. This may simply consist of commenting on other people’s thoughts, but it’s still an important way of expressing engaging points of view.

Write about what interests your audience, be they recruiters, customers or peers. Do it with a bit of style and personality, and people may be interested enough to read more of what you have to say. Even if you’ve never worked in a given area before, being able to articulate thoughtful arguments on that topic boosts your reputation as someone who can be trusted to communicate well and has the potential to become an expert. If an applicant sends me to her blog, I wouldn’t expect to land on a post about the relative promiscuity of girls at her university. (Nor would I expect that post to be littered with errors … Spell check, guys. Editing errors do not look professional or expert.)

However, all of this is nothing without delivery. As a young professional (or company), coming through on your promise is vital. Without the gravitas of a long career or big brand behind you, there is little for you to fall back on if you come up short. You don’t just get to ‘be’ credible – you have to invest in and prove yourself to get there.

As the demographics of those using social media change (I recently learned the average facebook user is 38) and given the emphasis on entrepreneurship as an option for young people in light of the economic climate, the definition of credibility may be in flux. Defining your own professional brand online can be the first step in shifting the credibility bias away from age.

The Transferability of Skill

This is my first week at the Rapid Innovation Group and I come to the company from an unlikely background. Having studied English, literature, languages, and medieval studies from undergrad through a PhD, I have often been asked in sneering tones, “What are you going to do with that?” Along with everyone else, I would have myself doubted that I would go on to found an online language-training business and start working for a hi-tech consultancy, but such is life.

With no actual training in business, I have been thinking a lot about “transferable skills” in my first few days at RIG. The concept is not as popular in my home country of America as it is here in the UK, and I’ve known many to dismiss the notion of transferable skills as a wishy-washy theory that has no validity in actual practice. But after less than a week at RIG, I find myself performing tasks that I have spent years training to execute swiftly and cleanly. Thank goodness I’m a medievalist.

First and perhaps most obvious is the skill of research. Knowing what questions to ask can be as important as the desired information itself. Being familiar with both the methodologies and tools of research, as well as frameworks for organizing and structuring information, data, and even thought saves time, energy, and therefore also money. Tracing the manuscript origins of a West Saxon copy of an Old English poem with an Anglian original requires a remarkably similar process to determining the potential marketing direction of a burgeoning startup. I’ve heard reported that Joseph Strayer, a prominent medieval historian who worked for the CIA, claimed that medievalists made excellent operatives because they were accustomed to making informed decisions on the basis of limited evidence. I see his point.

Most striking to me, however, is the importance of language. This includes nuanced ability to craft the English language, the ability to analyse someone else’s language, and the ability to speak other languages. When impressions count and arguments need to be made forcefully and quickly, language must be clear, clean, and to the point in order to have the desired effect. Understanding the subtleties of language allows one to perceive metamessages—whether consciously or unconsciously created—in the language of another party; this skill can be critical for assessing the tone, interest, or desires of a client, customer, or partner.

The importance of knowing other languages also cannot be undervalued. On the research front, knowledge of multiple languages allows one to gauge more quickly and accurately cultural values and sentiments held in other countries. Will this product find a market in Germany? What are South American newspapers reporting about this technology and its impact? These are hard questions to answer without knowing languages. Even more important is the ability to cross over into another’s culture via language; by eliminating this barrier, one eliminates many hurdles on the way to successful business. In my own experience, America is such a diverse country that no matter from where someone actually comes, I think of him or her as “American” so long as he or she speaks fluent American English. The fluency of language eliminates disconnects and makes it easy for me to feel “at home.” The same is true in developing relationships in non-English-speaking countries. 

I’ve always held the notion of transferable skills in high regard, but I did not expect to be using so much of my academic training right from the start. From my limited perspective, there are few backgrounds I could see as more useful for business than one involving detailed study of language and literature, and I am thankful for my training as a medievalist. “What will you do with medieval studies?” It seems quite logical to respond, “Start a business, then help develop hi-tech startups, of course!”

"Get Thee Down to a Hackathon, Young Man"

Hackathons are generally seen as being the preserve of enthusiastic developers. It’s all about the code, surely..??

I recently had the good fortune to be accepted for the Seedcamp Seedhack event – there were going to be 120 attendees, with a mix between coders and ‘business types’. My personal aim in going was to see inside the black box and understand what ‘bits’ it actually takes to build a web app/service.

As the event approached, I had a sense of great excitement at taking part but also a lot of self-doubt: what can I possibly contribute?

Shortly after arriving at LBS on a Friday evening, we were taken at breakneck pace through a raft of API presentations by companies such as Facebook and GIS Cloud. Then there was a special session highlighting the role that entrepreneur-driven innovation can play in the delivery of healthcare: Richard Stubbs, Programme Director for NHS Innovation Challenge Prizes, hailed the role of local initiatives as the antidote to the ‘one big system mentality’ behind the failed NHS core IT project. This was then nicely illustrated by the presentation that Mohammed Al-Ubaydli gave on the approach that his company, Patients Know Best, takes to healthcare data innovation.

In the days running up to the event, we had all been encouraged to post ideas on the event’s forum so that they could be commented on and voted on. The people with the highest scoring ideas then pitched them to the room – ideas included a credit scoring system based on social media data, a Facebook API-driven social dating application and an online social calendar. Teams were formed on the spot and went off to start work. Our mission was to have a minimum viable product (i.e. a working demonstration) by 4pm on Sunday.

Although I had posted my own idea which was a concept based on emerging Smart TV platforms, I chose instead to join an existing group so I could see a web app being built from the ground up. I joined up with three bright young developers from a development company in Bielsko-Biala, Poland who wanted to write a web-delivered system to integrate all the different operating and financial data sources that a small professional services company uses in order to generate easy and insightful profitability analysis metrics.

Fortunately I was able to be very useful – there was an emphasis on having an outline business rationale (which was based on the Lean Canvas framework) – so ‘business types’ like me were able to provide critical input on the customer proposition, the routes to market and the revenue models.

What was great was how much the developers valued the business input as they wanted to make something not just ‘cool’ but also with commercial potential.

By Sunday, most of the teams had a product demonstration ready. My team had a nicely designed online dashboard with a set of metrics and interactive Javascript graphs linked to dummy data on a custom-built Ruby on Rails engine. Very satisfying!

As we headed off to the nearby pub, everyone was happy but exhausted – at least one person had coded for 48 hours straight! I came out of the event with a much better sense of what it takes to build a decent web service, and having met a really good bunch of talented and motivated people (and having eaten more pizza in two days than I thought was humanly possible).

If you haven’t attended a hackathon, I would strongly recommend it!

Many thanks to Carlos Eduardo Espinal of Seedcamp and his team for putting together a fantastic event.

"I had a major decision to make: shut down or change"

StarBase, founded in 1992, is a London-based performance testing software consultancy with established testing expertise in a wide range of industries. We spoke to Stephen Davis, StarBase founder and MD, about his experience in starting his own company.

Why did you start StarBase?

"The reason I started StarBase was basically because I was fed up with big company politics and the fact that some people were more interested in empire building than working together for the benefit of the company, customers and staff. I was looking for an alternative to working for large companies; I wanted to work for them, but I realised I didn’t have to work for them directly.

"By understanding their requirements and challenges, I aimed to deliver solutions that would help them achieve their business objectives. I wanted to focus on delivering a great service and use the skills and knowledge I’d accumulated for the benefit of other businesses. I say to new staff, 'you only know what you’ve achieved by looking behind you at what you’ve done.' And most people want to do a good job."

How has your view of running your own business changed since you started StarBase?

"The enthusiasm and optimism I had at the beginning was replaced very quickly with a realisation that starting and running a business is tough. You’ve got to be able to dig deep to stay the course. The enthusiasm gave way to pragmatism: I had to lower my sights initially, and I had to revisit my business plan a few times.

"My initial aim was to focus on smaller companies, and that concept completely failed. My view was to target companies with a turnover of £50m - £150m but the reality was that they don’t buy enough services to warrant doing this. Further down the line, a significant turning point for StarBase was when the market we were targeting completely disappeared in January 2000. We had been focusing on the IBM AS/400 business computer but with all the upgrades put in place preparing for Y2K, no one planned to spend any money in 2000. I had a major decision to make: shut down or change. That was a major learning point – you have to be prepared to be adaptive and change as your market evolves.

"You do something, and you think, 'okay, that should work.' And when it doesn’t, you have to think, 'why isn’t it working?' You’ve just got to be ready to adjust your course and willing to revisit your business plan. You have to plan but you don’t have to stick rigidly to it. It has to evolve with you. Sometimes the plan is just not as clear as it should be; at other times you have total clarity.

"I’m a great believer in trying things, in experimentation. But I also have a view that if I’m not sure if something is going to work, try it, but if it’s going to fail, let it fail fast. I used to procrastinate and I don’t any more. I realised that by not making a decision I was making the situation worse. If I make a decision and it doesn’t work, I know it’s the wrong answer and it must be something else.

"Sometimes business leaders don’t like to be seen to fail, but if you look at the big ones, the ones in the media, they’ve all failed at some point in their careers. They’ve all had companies that haven’t worked or products that didn’t sell. You have to be prepared for things not to work; otherwise, you’re being too cautious."

How to approach an initial sales meeting

I wanted to write this post to follow up a previous one which covered the importance of having an effective sales process. The post began with a comment that entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products and are able to convey this deep enthusiasm in sales pitches.

The risk is that this can lead to relying upon a solution-centric approach which takes no heed of the prospect’s challenges. Founding CEOs frequently turn up at a sales meeting and wax lyrical about the features, capabilities and benefits of their solution. But how can you presume the solution will solve the prospect’s problem, without understanding what that problem is in detail? Getting this right is especially important at the early stages of your company’s life, as feedback from these early sales meetings can be vital to helping you refine product / market fit in the wider sense.

A meeting (or meeting preparation) should always begin with a focus on identifying the prospect’s key challenges. In addition to taking this approach for our clients, we also use it with our own prospects. I thought I would lay out the high-level methodology I employ when meeting potential future clients, because although we are selling services, the same approach should be used as part of a consultative sales process for an enterprise technology solution.

Set a clear objective

E.g. ‘To understand the {prospect’s} key growth objectives, strategies and the accompanying challenges. From this, to determine whether our capabilities and experience could be utilised to help address these challenges and as such accelerate the growth of the business’

Understand their challenges (to determine whether they can be addressed by your competencies / capabilities)

1. Elucidate these through a series of insightful questions. This serves a number of purposes beyond identifying their challenges:
   1. By asking the right questions, you demonstrate your expertise
   2. It gives a chance for you to highlight issues / opportunities which the prospect may not have been aware of
   3. It shows you have done your homework on their company, demonstrating that winning their business is of value to you
   
   
2. For example, I often try to drill down to the crux of a prospect’s challenges by structuring questions under the following headings:
   1. Market and competitive landscape
   2. Growth objectives / window of opportunity
   3. Market focus and rationale
   4. Market strategy and proposition
   5. Demand generation activities
   6. Sales and sales management processes
   7. Partnering capabilities
   
   
3. Explore potential synergies / areas of collaboration
   1. Give a relevant (according to the answers to the questions) background to your company / solution
   2. Discuss how a relevant selection of your competencies / capabilities could be used to address their most strategic challenges (elucidated earlier on)
   3. Add credence to the discussion by referring to appropriate case studies

Next steps (if appropriate)

1. Agree to structure the discussions into an objective driven programme of work
   1. If well put together, this document will in itself give you significant credibility, as well as laying out the value the prospect will gain from the collaboration
   2. Suggesting to put together this programme of work should be compelling for the prospect – they should get value from it even if they end up not choosing you to execute upon it

If you are thoughtful, effective and easy to work with during the sales process, you give direct assurance to the prospect that this will be the case after the sale. As well as using what you learn to tailor the relevance of your offering to the company in question, it also helps you develop your overall proposition and further refine your product / market fit.