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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Ries
Read between
February 14 - November 3, 2018
As long as an experiment is conducted prudently, without excessive risk of liability, and transparently, under clear executive authority, most middle managers can be convinced that these internal entrepreneurs are an essential resource to the company.
“The government is bureaucratic, but the White House isn’t,” he told the group, selling them hard on the move to D.C. “If I have to call your spouse or your children, I will.” Everyone laughed. “I’m not joking,” he replied. “As the president is talking to us,” Gelobter recalled, “all I can think is: ‘You have nothing more important to do with your time than talk to us? This is that important to you?’ My mother always said, when you’re interviewing for jobs, pick the company where the highest-ranking person talked to you. That’s how you know they’re actually invested in what you’ll be doing.
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By removing the obstacle of doubt, Obama made it possible for Park to hire a world-class team.
This is the role of the champion: to ensure that those who are leaning into the change have the resources available to clear obstacles that they, their coaches, and their managers may not have.
You’ve got to stop the people who want to block it.”
This is why I always start with a question-and-answer period. I’ve found that even the skeptics are more willing to get on board once their concerns have been addressed.
All we really want is the truth.
But as long as a team is making its way down the path of experimentation, it will learn its own lessons.
There’s another reason, though, why this style of coaching is especially important for startups. I always tell the teams I work with: I’m going to assume you’re right and I’m wrong about your plan. Let’s design our experiments to prove that.
this approach offers another major bonus: Sometimes the team really is right!
comparably few programs for lower-level employees. And we rarely treat those employees as internal founders. For more established companies, there are armies of outside consultants ready at a moment’s notice to enact every conceivable kind of training program. But there is no way for a large enough number of outside consultants to become familiar enough with the company to make the kind of impact we need in Phase Two.
Whatever a coaching program looks like, it’s critical to make sure that the coaches are more than just occasional participants and that they receive rigorous training. Nothing weakens a coaching program faster than filling it with people who feel that what they do isn’t being taken seriously
By elevating coaching into a real, vital position within the organization, tied to the future growth and success of everyone who works there, companies gain the resources to train people properly in a cross-functional manner and give them motivation to stay in the organization by providing a clear career path.
The coaches focus on three areas: leadership practices, collaboration practices, and technical practices.
“The Agile Doctor Is In,”
ENTITLEMENT FUNDING VERSUS METERED FUNDING
This is the deal with metered funding: absolute freedom to spend the money, with extremely strict criteria for how to unlock more, denominated only in validated learning.
The benefits of metered funding when transposed into a corporate context are many:
The only way to give this change staying power is to use the early successes and their attendant institutional clout to tackle the deep systems of the company—namely, its incentives structure, how people are held accountable, how resources are allocated. Think about government procurement and how deeply entrenched it is.
THE TEN-PAGE ONE-PAGE DOCUMENT
the lawyers said, “We hate being the gatekeepers. We don’t like saying no all the time. How can we be helpful to teams doing experimentation?”
Creating this document reversed the impact of legal on teams: The department became an enabler of faster speed rather than a creator of slowdowns.
FROM GATEKEEPER FUNCTIONS TO ENABLING FUNCTIONS The way this legal
systems, incentives, and mindsets that were holding this team
“Tell him about the cave.”
One of the engineers finally took pity on me and explained that every engineer in the room had an annual goal he or she worked toward, which was evaluated in EMS, based on a functional matrix of what excellence looks like for his or her job category. In this division, the amount of rework caused by an engineer was one of the key metrics to which the engineer would be held accountable. So any plan that increased rework would negatively affect that engineer’s annual review and career. Getting this project to market sooner, while certainly admirable and perhaps even desirable to the company at
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“I’m applying FastWorks and learning, and in many cases I’m invalidating assumptions. I should pivot but can’t because of the way I’m being held accountable.”
remembers Janice Semper. So what went wrong? First, the team tried to pin the problem on the app. Too complicated? Nope. Their test had failed not because the technological tool was bad, but because the behaviors and environment needed to deploy it effectively weren’t there. Employees said they wanted to give upward and collegial feedback, but when it came to actually doing so, they were too uncomfortable. There was no history of this kind of exchange at GE, and they had no idea how their colleagues would react to it, so they took the safest option, which was to do nothing at all.
“That particular learning helped us to transition from technology as the center of our performance approach to using technology as simply an enabler of the approach,”
“In our old way of working,” Beihl explains, “we would have told them they were doing it ‘wrong’ and helped them ‘fix’ it. Now we understood how they were actually acting and pivoted the approach to meet that.”
They changed the way people in the company think of success.
that even HR can act like a startup.
stake in the outcome,
sense of ownership over their shared fate.
“In many corporate structures, you end up moving up in a company by managing more people. I don’t want someone to feel like in order to grow in their career they need to become a manager. And conversely, I don’t want them to feel bad for letting it go.”10
WordPress has structured incentives this way since its founding in 2003.
What’s missing is the willingness of general managers to commit to specific milestones for valuing the project’s success.
“Dogs at work, yoga, organic food—that’s not culture. [Culture] is the collective behavior of everyone in the organization. It’s what people do when left to their own devices. It’s the organization’s way of doing things.”
Culture quote
They can take either an online class, which is supported by discussion boards and follow-up conversations, or an in-person class of six to eight hours.
Future working opportunity.
Online support for lean and hcd in companies
Asana
“From the beginning we were intentional about wanting to be intentional.
“cultural bugs”
“falsely empowered”—they
they had decision-making power, but their decisions were too frequently overridden by higher-ups—the
A very common line of criticism for corporate projects in their early days, when the gross numbers are small, is that even if the early results are promising, the sample size is too insignificant to matter.
“You say we have too small a sample size. Excellent. We’re glad you agree our budget should be increased. Let’s scale up the experiment and get a larger sample.”
Innovation Accounting (IA) is a way of evaluating progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are effectively zero.
Innovation accounting is a system for translating from the vague language of “learning” to the hard language of dollars. It puts a price not just on success but also on information.
Level 1: Dashboard
The key piece of data in this process is the per-customer input, something that can be measured
