(cross posted at sherylsbooklist.blogspot.com)  

This is probably the top business book that has been recommended to me since I joined a startup. Now that I have read it, I can understand why – it ought to be required reading for anyone coming from a big company into a fast-paced startup. I had many a “a-ha” moment reading this, like “Oh, that’s why we are shipping a product that seems incomplete…it’s on purpose!”

The concept of Lean Manufacturing grew out of the Toyota Production Systems innovations of the mid-20th century. This comprised the idea of constantly improving systems, measuring more important things, and driving organizational learning. In grad school, I remember learning about this, and about its influence on the software industry. Agile/scrum development seems to have its roots in Lean.

So all this forms the backdrop for the ideas in this book – that companies and projects in general can use a lot of the same concepts that have fundamentally improved Manufacturing and Software Development. There’s a real focus on learning and structuring the product development process to increase the speed with which everyone learns. (And it is worth pointing out that like Innovator’s Dilemma, this is relevant for innovative parts of big companies, not just startups.) Two items stuck with me the most:

1. Vanity Metrics – Ries argues strongly against using vanity metrics when evaluating a change to a product. He says that too often metrics are chosen that look like improvements when really they aren’t, like number of downloads (without number of repeat customers) or number of repeat customers (without number of paying customers.) He says you really need to know what you are measuring and why.

2. Experiments – Ries gives several examples of how you want to run experiments about your product in real life with real customers. If your audience is big enough, A/B test actual features. Release great products without all their features to see if you have Andreesen’s elusive product/market fit. Ask focus group customers the right questions, not question your existing assumptions. 

It’s his examples that I liked the most – they were perfectly relevant and constructive. He’s delightfully honest about how hard it is to learn this way by sharing his experiences at his company IMVU. In any case, this is a MUST-READ for people interested in the model for success in technical innovation in the next decade. It’s in my mental bookshelf next to “Innovator’s Dilemma” “Good to Great” and “Crossing the Chasm.”

Last week I was on the #43 bus headed home and a friendly woman sat down next to me.

“Oh, that’s a great book. Are you liking it?”

None of that is remarkable, except that I was reading The Lean Startup and she worked in sales for a software startup. So we had a lot in common.

“I do like it,” I said. “Coming from a big company, I’m finding it really helpful to understand why we sometimes make certain decisions.”

She started to rattle off several other books she really liked, all of which I need to add to my business reading list.

Decisive (which she described as a book that helped you learn how to make good long-term decisions)

Switch

Great by Choice

She shared a concept from the last book that I really liked – that Jim Collins explains that before shooting a cannonball, gunners would shoot a bullet. It’s less expensive than a cannonball but tells you you are looking in the right direction. You can do that in business too, release a limited version of your product, or release to a limited audience, so you can calibrate if you are in the right place.

I’m almost done with Lean Startup (which I’ll review here soon) and that cannonball concept seemed like a cool extension of the ideas from that book.

This woman’s stop came up before mine, and we didn’t exchange cards, but maybe we’ll have a chance to talk again on the #43 bus.

When I was in grad school (nearly 10 years ago now), one of my courses was called “Learning to Lead.”  It was a practical course on leadership and management that spanned throughout the entire 18-month program alongside more traditional courses on product development, finance, and engineering methodologies.

In Learning to Lead I and II, students learn the basic concepts about leadership, management and teamwork. The uniqueness of this course is within the teaching methodology, which has been developed to accelerate the advancement of self-awareness and interpersonal competencies. Specific topics covered in Learning to Lead 1 include: personality types (Myers-Briggs type indicator assessment), best practices in forming and maintaining team performance, giving and receiving feedback, individual and team creativity, communicating to inspire and influencing without authority. Topics in Learning to Lead II include systems thinking, team decision making, communication across cultures, shared visions and organizational change.

We often took assessments to determine our styles and preferences, because that self-awareness is central to leading well.  One of the assessments we took was about learning styles, through the Center for Creative Leadership.  This assessment evaluated what tactics I used when I was learning something new.

• Accessing other people
• Taking Action
• Thinking

Center for Creative Leadership model of Learning Tactics. Taken from Amazon book preview.

I thought of these as: Asking for help, Figuring it out hands-on, Figuring it out myself in my head in a dark room alone.

And as it turned out, I never, ever, asked for help.  I occasionally tried to figure it out out hands-on, and I nearly always tried to figure it out myself in my head in a dark room alone.  In retrospect, it wasn’t super-surprising: being trained as a mathematician, it’s often about just sitting in a room and figuring it out.

But when I learned this, the moment I had was “OMG, everyone else is working together and asking each other for help, and here I am trying to whack through everything alone.  I’m missing out!”  In fact, I remember thinking that everyone else had this advantage toward their succeeding that I was ignoring: relying on each other.  Mathematician or not, how did I miss this in school?

And thus began a change in how I tried to approach problems and learning.  I started asking people at work for help, for their opinion, to explain things to me.  And it was great!  My colleagues didn’t even seem to notice that I was any different, and I was getting more help.  But it was always deliberate.  I had to think hard about reaching out to collaborate with people.

Fast forward to my start at Infinio.  New environment, new tasks, lots to learn.  In some areas, it’s felt very natural to ask for help.  In other areas, specifically content creation, it’s been harder to access others.  There’ve been a few projects where I’ve shown Alan some of my work, and just 20 minutes with him has made it twice as good as when I started. I don’t know why that’s so hard to do every time.

It’s not that I don’t want the feedback.  Part of it may be that I have the idea that having the level of experience I have means that my work should be pretty complete when I do it on my own.  Which of course is ridiculous – even the greatest authors have great editors.

I think it boils down to the fact that I’m neither inclined nor trained to access others and I will always need to work to ensure that I’m doing it.

I’m sitting in LAX waiting for my flight and reflecting on the past few days.  It was my first business trip for Infinio, and my first tradeshow in many years.  Here are 5 things I learned:

1. Your co-workers are key to your happiness at work.  If you aren’t sure this is true, then spend 9 consecutive hours staffing a tradeshow booth with them.  I’m lucky.  Mine are pretty awesome.

2. The buying process has really changed in the past 10 years.  We talk about how our marketing has to change because customers are more educated and do more of their research before contacting vendors, but I didn’t realize that would make tradeshows different.  But they are.  Customers were much less likely to walk up to our booth and say, “hi, what do you do?”  They were more likely to either (a) read our booth signage to see if we were relevant to them, or (b) already know about us and whether they were interested, or (c) avoid us like you do the cellphone kiosks in the mall.

3. Citrix has a very well-developed and well-honed partner program.  I was consistently impressed with the channel partners I met at the show.  They were very knowledgable about Citrix and all the ecosystem products, and they were notably enthusiastic about learning more about a technology that could help their customers.  They were a really impressive group of people who asked great questions.

4. I need to look into a standing desk.  My colleagues at the show were much more comfortable standing for long periods of time than I was.  We hypothesized that it was because of their use of standing desks.

5. The weather in Anaheim in May is lovely.  I forgot how nice it is to eat outside.

Last week I wrote about the major differences between my experience at Dell and my experience here at Infinio.

One of those was the idea that here, there’s no supposition that at least someone, somewhere knows the answer.

That is really, really hard to digest for someone like me.  I have a predisposition to assume that there is an answer to everything.

I shouldn’t think that, I know.  Even my professional training as a mathematician should teach me that isn’t the case – look at how many unsolved problems still exist in math and may forever.  Look at Godel’s incompleteness Theorem.

Or, last week I was at an engineering meeting and the topic of discussion was a terrible little behavior we were seeing in our product’s interaction with another product.  This behavior came up over and over, and while we fixed each instance of the problem, we had no way of knowing that we had addressed every instance of the problem that could arise.

While extensive testing could minimize that risk, it can’t eliminate it entirely.  As one of the engineers said, “There’s no real way to know when software is ‘done’ or ‘right.’”

This feeling has awed me in the past once before as well.  Before babyDiva, mrDiva and I used to travel a lot, and one of our best vacations was to Belize.  We had planned to hike ATM, a well known cave-system in the Cayo district, but the rains had been so intense that it was un-navigable.

Disappointed, we went to our hosts who said, “Oh, let’s call Ken!  You can go see Ken’s cave.”

mrDiva, our guide Leo, & Ken, with his 1979 Land Rover

Ken’s cave, it turned out, was amazing.  Known more formally as Achtun Chapat, it was only accessible by a bumpy ride in the back of Ken’s 197X Land Rover.  He and his guide led us through a 5-6 hour hike into the cave system, pointing out bats, bones, and pottery shards as we went.  There were cathedral height ceilings and crawl spaces.  Beautiful stalactites and stalagmites.  It was pitch black when we turned off our headlamps.  Like, literally black.  At the end of the cave, we sat under a sinkhole that provided some sunlight from above and enjoyed Ken’s wife’s homemade burritos.

As we were sitting, Ken mentioned casually that this was one path, but they hadn’t mapped the entire cave yet.  There were probably 100’s of additional yards of cave that nobody had yet traversed, because of safety issues – low oxygen rates and unpredictable lakes.

It was inconceivable to me.  This cave was obviously a national treasure for Belize, at least as complex and rich in archeological and natural items many of the well-known sites in Central America.  How could they not have mapped it out?  Aren’t there X-rays or robots or something that could do this?

mrDiva and me, at the entrance to Achtun Chapat

But there aren’t.  Or they’re not economically or practically viable in Belize.  Or Belize chooses not to explore this for fear of losing control of their resources.

Whatever the reason, I am still overwhelmed by the idea that there’s a cave that I have been in that is only sort of understood.

Sometimes, we just don’t know the answer.