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.
