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

by Eric Ries

The five key principles behind the Startup Way philosophy are: CONTINUOUS INNOVATION: Too many leaders are searching for that one key innovation. But long-term growth requires something different: a method for finding new breakthroughs repeatedly, drawing on the creativity and talent of every level of the organization. STARTUP AS ATOMIC UNIT OF WORK: In order to create cycles of continuous innovation and unlock new sources of growth, companies need to have teams that can experiment to find them. These teams are internal startups, and they require a distinct organizational structure to support them. THE MISSING FUNCTION: If you add startups to an organization’s ecosystem, they must be managed in ways that confound traditional techniques. Most organizations are missing a core discipline—entrepreneurship—that is just as vital to their future success as marketing or finance. THE SECOND FOUNDING: Making this kind of profound change to an organization’s structure is like founding the company all over again, whether it’s five or a hundred years old. CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMATION: All of this requires the development of a new organizational capability: the ability to rewrite the organization’s DNA in response to new and diverse challenges. It would be a shame to transform only once. When a company has figured out how to transform, it can—and should—be prepared to do it many more times in the future.