The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth

by Eric Ries

For many internal projects—in IT, HR, and finance—as well as products sold via third-party distributors, people often don’t know what the word customer even means. One IT team in a large enterprise I worked with refused to see the employees who used their product as customers. They insisted that employees had no choice and that IT could mandate the usage of any product. But the word customer always implies a choice in the matter, so rather than argue, we decided to go see for ourselves. I asked the team to interview several existing users of the IT system within the firm to see what their rate of compliance was. The team was scandalized to learn that employees hated the software so much that they were using a wide array of work-arounds to avoid using it at all. Some employees were actually duplicating the system’s calculations by hand on paper. Customers, even internal ones, always have a choice. No corporate mandate can ever hope to achieve 100 percent compliance unless employees buy in.