Quotes About Adaptation

Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop.

All successful sales models depend on breaking down the monolithic view of organizations into the disparate people that make them up.

Every setback is an opportunity for learning.

We've discussed the telltale signs of the need to pivot: the decreasing effectiveness of product experiments and the general feeling that product development should be more productive. Whenever you see those symptoms, consider a pivot.

Pivotal Labs.

are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change?

do any of us feel that the world around us is getting more and more stable every day?

The true measure of runway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy.

work-in-progress (WIP) inventory]

Although the primary changes that are required in an adaptive organization are in the mind-set of its employees, changing the culture is not sufficient. As we saw in Chapter 9, lean management requires treating work as a system and then dealing with the batch size and cycle time of the whole process. Thus, to achieve lasting change, the QuickBooks team had to invest in tools and platform changes that would enable the new, faster way of working.

They are fast. They embrace new thinking. They are geared for disruption and innovation through uncertainty. One

Si no solucionas problemas, nunca vas a adquirir la capacidad necesaria para hacer realidad esa gran visión». Y la manera de resolver problemas es descubrirlos sobre la marcha y luego pivotar para afrontarlos.

A famous example is the chain Potbelly Sandwich Shop, which today has over two hundred stores. It began as an antique store in 1977; the owners started to sell sandwiches as a way to bolster traffic to their stores. Pretty soon they had pivoted their way into an entirely different line of business.

Startups are different: too much budget is as harmful as too little—as countless dot-com failures can attest—and startups are extremely sensitive to midcourse budgetary changes.

If you are building the wrong thing, optimizing the product or its marketing will not yield significant results.

In 1911 Taylor wrote: "In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first." Taylor's prediction has come to pass.

Startup Lessons Learned,

established companies need to figure out how to accomplish what Scott Cook did in 1983, but on an industrial scale and with an established cohort of managers steeped in traditional management culture.

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

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.

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

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.

Entrepreneurship is management