The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [112]
We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.1
A century on, what can we say about those words? On the one hand, they feel archaic. We of the twenty-first century are hyperaware of the importance of efficiency and the economic value of productivity gains. Our workplaces are—at least when it comes to the building of material objects—incredibly well organized compared with those of Taylor’s day.
On the other hand, Taylor’s words strike me as completely contemporary. For all of our vaunted efficiency in the making of things, our economy is still incredibly wasteful. This waste comes not from the inefficient organization of work but rather from working on the wrong things—and on an industrial scale. As Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2
And yet we are doing the wrong things efficiently all the time. It is hard to come by a solid estimate of just how wasteful modern work is, but there is no shortage of anecdotes. In my consulting and travels talking about the Lean Startup, I hear the same message consistently from employees of companies big and small. In every industry we see endless stories of failed launches, ill-conceived projects, and large-batch death spirals. I consider this misuse of people’s time a criminally negligent waste of human creativity and potential.
What percentage of all this waste is preventable? I think a much larger proportion than we currently realize. Most people I meet believe that in their industry at least, projects fail for good reasons: projects are inherently risky, market conditions are unpredictable, “big company people” are intrinsically uncreative. Some believe that if we just slowed everything down and used a more careful process, we could reduce the failure rate by doing fewer projects of higher quality. Others believe that certain people have an innate gift of knowing the right thing to build. If we can find enough of these visionaries and virtuosos, our problems will be solved. These “solutions” were once considered state of the art in the nineteenth century, too, before people knew about modern management.
The requirements of an ever-faster world make these antique approaches unworkable, and so the blame for failed projects and businesses often is heaped on senior management, which is asked to do the impossible. Alternatively, the finger of blame is pointed at financial investors or the public markets for overemphasizing quick fixes and short-term results. We have plenty of blame to go around, but far too little theory to guide the actions of leaders and investors alike.
The Lean Startup movement stands in contrast to this hand-wringing. We believe that most forms of waste in innovation are preventable once their causes are understood. All that is required is that we change our collective mind-set concerning how this work is to be done.
It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things. By focusing on functional efficiency, we lose sight of the real goal of innovation: to learn that which is currently unknown. As Deming taught, what matters is not setting quantitative goals but fixing the method by which those goals are attained. The Lean Startup movement stands for the principle that the scientific method can be brought