The Startup Way

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, entrepreneur in residence at Harvard, serial entrepreneur, and founder of the Lean Startup meetups, showed how ideas from the startup world such as constant iteration, minimal viable products (or MVPs), and constantly testing business hypotheses with customers to determine when to persevere, and when to pivot, now turns his attention to established, mature companies and organizations. For the past four years, Ries has been working closely with companies such as GE, Toyota, and Pitney Bowes to help them become nimbler and more open to change and innovation, in order to spur growth and produce products and services that customers want. In The Startup Way, Ries shares his insights, lessons, stories, challenges, and best practices from his intense collaborations with some of the world's most innovative and successful companies, as they attempt to change their culture and processes to be faster and smarter at what they do. At GE, Ries's ideas are codified under the name FastWorks; each company adapts his basic framework and ideas in its own way, to fit its particular organization and industry, as Ries discusses in the book. For every company that recognizes its needs to embrace agility and change, and to do so quickly if it is to survive and thrive, The Startup Way is an absolutely critical guide and toolkit.