The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth Hardcover – October 17, 2017

There are two forces moving through organizations related to innovation. Digital design is one, centered around the idea of creating new compelling customer experiences through investing in chief digital officers and design teams. Adopting a start up capability is another response to innovation and the focus of this book.While only some of us can be designers, all of us can become part of Startup project in their organization. That is what makes this book important to anyone who wants to do something new, different and drive to create new sources of value and growth.The Startup Way builds off of Ries's experience bringing the Lean Startup thinking into corporate America. This book provides a comprehensive playbook filled with case experiences to help work people through the Startup process. Deep in details and light on hype, this is a book with heavy underlines, dog eared pages and examples of how it could work in my company. This is a rare book in that regard, particularly after reading technology hype book after technology hype book.Now that the context is set here are the details:Part 1: The Modern Company -- establishes the need and role of innovation in corporations. This is the more preachy part of the book, suggested that you give this part a quick read as its pretty standard.Chapter 1 Respect the Past, Invent the FutureChapter 2 Entrepreneurship: The Missing FunctionChapter 3 The Start Up State of MindChapter 4 Lessons from the Startup -- the best chapter in the sectionChapter 5 A Management System of Innovation at Scale -Part 2: A Roadmap for Transformation -- gets at the meat of the start up process in a corporate contextChapter 6 Phase One: Critical MassChapter 7 Phase Two: Scaling UpChapter 8 Phase Three Deep SystemsChapter 9 Innovation AccountingPart 3: The Big Picture -- looks at the idea of innovation in the broader context of society, public policy etc. This is the more preachy part of the book which is enlightening but not the strongest part of the book.Chapter 10 A Unified Theory of EntreprenurshipChapter 11 Toward a Pro-Entreprenuership Public PolicyEpilogue A New Civic Religion

Living in DC, I've been fascinated by the Silicon Valley way. As a former developer, I'm indoctrinated in agile software development principles. I discovered the predecessor book "The Lean Startup" in 2011 and struggled to figure out how to fit it into a large, bureaucratic organization that is still aligned along industrial-era management concepts. I am the target audience.Eric doesn't presume that you've read "The Lean Startup" in this book. His story telling approach does a fine job of summarizing those concepts while simultaneously hinting at the need for it in the first part. He then dives in deeper in the later parts of the book.He establishes early on that the approach in the book was not created in a vacuum. Rather, it incubated with GE and flourished in other large organizations, including some US government agencies where one might expect it falling on deaf ears. The Startup Way is a non-antagonistic approach to leavening the culture of any large organization, creating a new duality between a standing traditional management structure and introducing an innovation management capability. It anticipates a new type of career field that uses established scientific principles.This is not about a flashy business concept. This is a reasoned approach to organizational change that we need to adapt to the current environment...and keep adapting in the decades to come. Maybe this is Deming for our time?I was one of those who pre-ordered the book as soon as I was aware (a bit later than many, perhaps). Hoping to apply its principles a bit sooner than the October release, I found that Eric made beta copies to those of us who pre-ordered. That said, I don't read every lean business book that happens to be on Amazon.If you're not reading this book and working to apply it to your organization, then don't be surprised when your rivals have lapped you.

Great book that brings the principals of Lean Startup to the enterprise. A must read for any leader who wishes to build new capabilities based on learn-build-measure feedback loop.

As a practitioner of Lean Startup methodology within a large enterprise, I found the book to be both insightful and helpful with respect to the projects and programs with which i am engaged. The three phases of transformation enumerated by Eric are correct, coherent, and useful with respect to understanding where you/your company is, and in identifying the biggest challenges that enterprises face and the ones that are likely to be most impactful if solved for. The grounding of the principles in real world examples will make them that much more accessible to the reader. Each reader will need to figure out how to adapt the principles, tools, and terminology for their business, and I think the diagrams, charts, tables, and stories Eric provides are very useful for that purpose. The concept of how to scale a business is a great topic and a great problem to have to solve. The close of the book was highly inspiring - the creation of a longer term stock market - and something i believe will ultimately lead to great benefit for all. Nicely done. (note that i read a pre-release version for this review, but have also since bought the released version of the book)