The Startup Way

To thrive in the coming century, every organization needs the ability to experiment rapidly with new products and new business models; to empower their most creative people, and to engage repeatedly in a process of innovation in order to unlock new sources of growth and productivity. A modern company must give every employee the opportunity to be an entrepreneur, recognizing entrepreneurship as a core discipline. The lessons of the lean startup movement of Silicon Valley are the basis of The Startup Way, a series of tools and techniques that will unleash this entrepreneurial approach in any organization. The core of the approach is the small, internal startup team, a cross-functional group that is focused on testing leap-of-faith assumptions about potential new products with the use of minimum viable products. A repeated cycle of testing leads to an iterative process where failure becomes a key component in validated learning. Making use of growth boards and metered funding, the teams learn how to pivot or persevere on each project. Embedding the entrepreneurial function in the organizational structure, creating career paths and assessment processes that value innovation, and making use of innovation accounting, ultimately leads to an organization that embodies the concept of continuous transformation.