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

by Eric Ries

It requires: Leadership skills of a most distinctive kind, since transformation pits its leader against the hostile reactions of experienced people whose lives and careers are deeply invested in the status quo. Audacious experimentation, since beyond the general framework I’ve presented so far, every organization has to find its own distinctive shape, its own unique adaptations to the specific context in which it operates. The boldness to invest in sweeping, company-wide change—and the patience to wait until just the right moment to make this commitment. The discipline to start with small experiments that might hasten the arrival of the right moment without growing too big, too bloated, too fast. The most difficult kind of cross-functional collaboration: enlisting functional leaders in the creation of new and competing functions, thereby breaking down old functional silos and requiring old enemies to make common cause.