

Lean startups find their moment - nivi
http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startups

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aditya
The question in my mind against most of these efficiency driven programs is
simple. If you're always looking to eliminate waste and become super
efficient, you're not spending any time being creative or chasing radical
ideas that may or may not be worth the effort spent on executing them.

Innovation sometimes requires a lot of wasteful experimentation and it looks
like that is completely anti-thetical to the whole efficiency argument.

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ph0rque
I wonder if you can have the best of both worlds by spending 80% of your time
on efficiently making money, and 20% on experimenting wastefully? (The split
isn't as important as the idea).

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aditya
That's an interesting idea but it's hard to evolve a culture of superefficient
mindbots (a la Toyota's conveyer belt workers) and crazy hackers with no
interest in money.

3M struggled with this as well:
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406....](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm)

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alecco
When I proposed this kind of approach on a UK/US corporation I was waved away
due to alleged unnecessary optimizations and lack of focus. Every little
project tended to get over six figures a year just in support and licensing,
any decision agreed in the countless meetings was carved in stone.

Many big US corporations can't survive this crisis because they have a
systemic culture problem. Corporate behavior is very hard to change at that
size. Truly lean approach requires maturity. These corporations only seem
understand as a lean approach to simply reduce the workforce.

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comatose_kid
Neat observations. I wonder how one can become more effective at understanding
which features customers won't want. I guess focus groups are one answer, but
the danger with these is that your product's desirability may be limited to a
local maximum. Further, it seems that the most desirable, iconic products
rarely come from focus groups.

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drawkbox
Yes that is what I took away. I think the article was highlighting the get it
out and often mentality. Like a build early and often type of iterative
approach rather than work on things you think the customer might want without
some experimentation with the product/market insight.

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mtw
see also Eric's blog who begun a series about lean startups.

if remember well, he started here
[http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/lean-
start...](http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/lean-startup.html)

