Quotes from Eric Ries

The Lean Startup is a set of practices for helping entrepreneurs increase their odds of building a successful startup.

Unfortunately, "learning" is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution.

In traditional mass production, the way to avoid stockouts—not having the product the customer wants—is to keep a large inventory of spares just in case.

Functional specialists, especially those steeped in waterfall or stage-gate development, have been trained to work in extremely large batches. This causes even good ideas to get bogged down by waste. By making the batch size small, the sandbox method allows teams to make cheap mistakes quickly and start learning.

But large inventories are expensive because they have to be transported, stored, and tracked.

In effect, the huge productivity increases made possible by modern management and technology have created more productive capacity than firms know what to do with.

Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor. In

of work. Over that period, we were making constant improvements to the

Lean production solves the problem of stockouts with a technique called pull.

Half of those products are generating revenue today, and the rest are awaiting initial orders, all thanks to the power of working in small batches.

the boring stuff that matters the most.

As Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."2

work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry.

However, all companies engage in all four phases of work all the time.

Companies that cannot bring themselves to pivot to a new direction on the basis of feedback from the marketplace can get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing enough nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees and other stakeholders but not moving ahead.

As Peter Drucker said, "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

The ideal goal is to achieve small batches all the way down to single-piece flow along the entire supply chain. Each step in the line pulls the parts it needs from the previous step. This is the famous Toyota just-in-time production method.

Every successful product or feature began life in research and development (R&D), eventually became a part of the company's strategy, was subject to optimization, and in time became old news.

Enable and empower teams to make fast and courageous decisions.

As an engineer and later as a manager, I was accustomed to measuring progress by making sure our work proceeded according to plan, was high quality, and cost about what we had projected.

When companies switch to this kind of production, their warehouses immediately shrink, as the amount of just-in-case inventory [called work-in-progress (WIP) inventory] is reduced dramatically. This almost magical shrinkage of WIP is where lean manufacturing gets its name. It's as if the whole supply chain suddenly went on a diet.

Entrepreneurship is management

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget? When I went home at the end of a day's work, the only things I knew for sure were that I had kept people busy and spent money that day.

Until we could figure out how to sell and make the product, it wasn't worth spending any engineering time on.