The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [113]
ORGANIZATIONAL SUPERPOWERS
A participant at one of my workshops came up to me a few months afterward to relate the following story, which I am paraphrasing: “Knowing Lean Startup principles makes me feel like I have superpowers. Even though I’m just a junior employee, when I meet with corporate VPs and GMs in my large company, I ask them simple questions and very quickly help them see how their projects are based on fundamental hypotheses that are testable. In minutes, I can lay out a plan they could follow to scientifically validate their plans before it’s too late. They consistently respond with ‘Wow, you are brilliant. We’ve never thought to apply that level of rigor to our thinking about new products before.’ ”
As a result of these interactions, he has developed a reputation within his large company as a brilliant employee. This has been good for his career but very frustrating for him personally. Why? Because although he is quite brilliant, his insights into flawed product plans are due not to his special intelligence but to having a theory that allows him to predict what will happen and propose alternatives. He is frustrated because the managers he is pitching his ideas to do not see the system. They wrongly conclude that the key to success is finding brilliant people like him to put on their teams. They are failing to see the opportunity he is really presenting them: to achieve better results systematically by changing their beliefs about how innovation happens.
Putting the System First: Some Dangers
Like Taylor before us, our challenge is to persuade the managers of modern corporations to put the system first. However, Taylorism should act as a cautionary tale, and it is important to learn the lessons of history as we bring these new ideas to a more mainstream audience.
Taylor is remembered for his focus on systematic practice rather than individual brilliance. Here is the full quote from The Principles of Scientific Management that includes the famous line about putting the system first:
In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.
In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.3
Unfortunately, Taylor’s insistence that scientific management does not stand in opposition to finding and promoting the best individuals was quickly forgotten. In fact, the productivity gains to be had through the early scientific management tactics, such as time and motion study, task-plus-bonus, and especially functional foremanship (the forerunner of today’s functional departments), were so significant that subsequent generations of managers lost sight of the importance of the people who were implementing them.
This has led to two problems: (1) business systems became overly rigid and thereby failed to take advantage of the adaptability, creativity, and wisdom of individual workers, and (2) there has been an overemphasis on planning, prevention, and procedure, which enable organizations to achieve consistent results in a mostly static world. On the factory floor, these problems have been tackled head on by the lean manufacturing movement, and those lessons have spread throughout many modern corporations. And yet in new product development, entrepreneurship, and innovation work in general we are still using an outdated framework.
My hope is that the Lean Startup movement will not fall into the same reductionist trap. We are just beginning to uncover