Insight
Ries: Corporate bureaucracy and slowness at scale are choices, not inevitable
“I have become a believer that even that the bureau, that the bureaucracy and slowness and kind of ossification that we take for granted as a result of scale is not an inevitable development, but it's a choice about the systems of management that we use.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ries: Enterprise CEOs cannot name anyone accountable for continuous innovation
“I ask these CEOs that I meet with all the time, who's in charge of making sure that that happens? And they don't know. There's not, there's nobody in the organization they can point to for accountability on that score.”
Insight
Ries: Entrepreneurship is defined by extreme uncertainty, not job title
“Since my definition of entrepreneurship is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty, then you are an entrepreneur no matter what it says on your business card.”
Opinion
Ries: Corporate entrepreneurs are as visionary as Silicon Valley founders
“There are real honest to God entrepreneurs just as visionary, just as exciting to work with inside some of these large organizations as you walk down the street here in Silicon Valley.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ries: Most corporations planning internal startups lack an actual execution plan
“The idea that you're going to act like a startup or have internal startups is like almost to the point of cliche here. And yet most of the companies that I meet that have that as a plan, there's no plan. They don't actually know how to make it happen.”
Opinion
Ries: Large corporations make terrible partners for startups
“Most big companies are terrible partners. They don't understand how to pilot things. They don't understand how to work with startups in a way that don't kill them. They spend way too much time on contract negotiations, and they just, they're unreliable.”
Opinion
Ries: Distinguishing enterprise Lean Startup from startup Lean Startup is silly
“So people talk about lean startup for startups and then lean startup for the enterprise, which I think is really silly. I, you know, I understand why people do it, but it doesn't make sense to me.”
Insight
Ries: Founder CEOs at scaled companies act as internal venture capitalists
“For the people inside their company, they're the VC. They're the source of funding and political capital that everybody needs to sustain what they do.”
Insight
Ries: A small group of passionate customers outweighs indifferent users
“A small number of extremely passionate customers is way better than a large number of people who kind of are indifferent about your product”
Assertion Partly supported
Ries: USDS digitized 40% of immigration applications in six months
“They sent a lean startup team in, I think, from the United States Digital Service at the White House, and You know, they partnered. It wasn't just IT people coming and telling everybody what to do, but they had real partnership, real user centered design, real…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ries: Lean Startup reduced a client's hardware iteration cycle to one week
“And they eventually got to a place where they can show, they can iterate on this so quickly now, they can build a new version of that device every week. Used to take them three to six years to build a new model. Now they can do a new version every week.”
Insight
Eric Ries: Monotonous work should be automated to unlock human creativity
“Work that is monotonous and routine should be automated because every human being has a right to use their creativity in their job.”
Insight
Ries: MVPs are for testing consequential visions, not cheap features
“The core mistake I think people make is they think that it's a minimum product, right? Like if you're trying to do something small in this world, you don't need to do an MVP. You just do it. Like if it's, if the thing itself is cheap and easy and has an obviou…”
Insight
Ries: Forcing founders into 'success theater' distracts from product execution
“And I think every ounce of energy we force visionaries to put into success theater is an ounce of energy they didn't put in to making their vision a reality. They didn't put into serving customers.”
Insight
Ries: Even correct entrepreneurial visions usually have fatal strategy flaws
“If you get the real story with actual entrepreneurs, what you discover is that even if the vision is right on and they see the future, the specifics of the strategy often have fatal flaws.”
Insight
Ries: Entrepreneurs can now rent the means of production to scale
“We are now living through a time where you can rent the means of production, which means that if you want to test an idea, if you want to start something in your dorm room at Harvard, You know, just because you started small doesn't necessarily mean it can't s…”
Insight
Ries: Open platform strategies create smaller pieces of larger aggregate markets
“If you make those tools available to other people so that you don't have complete control, if you turn it into a platform, if you give people open access, the sum total of the creative power that you unleash when you do that means that you have a smaller piece…”
Insight
Ries: Forecasts are accurate only when extrapolated from stable history
“A forecast is accurate only to the extent that it is an extrapolation from a long and stable operating history.”
Insight
Ries: Functional silos block enterprises from spending $2M to commercialize breakthroughs
“These companies can spend through their technology readiness level, you know, analysis and portfolio, like they can do the smart research to spend five, 10, 15, fifty million dollars To have a breakthrough. And then they often are not able to spend the like tw…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ries: Consumer services will all be tech-enabled within 10 years
“I know that five or 10 years from now, the person who provides me this service, it's going to be technology enabled. It's going to be developed and According to these principles, it's going to be rapidly evolved to suit my needs.”
Insight
Ries: Continuous corporate disruption requires hundreds of simultaneous experiments
“If you want to have a new successful disruption every couple of years, you need to have hundreds of experiments going at any one time.”
Insight
Ries: Traditional upfront project management systems are obsolete
“That system of managing work is not a good one for our time. Maybe it was a good, maybe it made sense in a different era, but it really doesn't make sense now, and there is a better way.”
Insight
Ries: Lean Startup provides neutral ground across corporate functions
“Lean startup has created a neutral terrain where different functions can come together to do this, and I think there's just a natural resistance to doing a methodology from someone else's function.”
Insight
Ries: Entrepreneurial transformation is a management problem, not a technology problem
“This, before it is anything else, is a management issue. It is not a technology issue. It is not a process or tools issue. It is really about how do we manage people. Most companies have all the raw material they need to work in this more entrepreneurial way”
Eric Ries