Lean startup in HBR

You know when a business idea has become mainstream, when you read about it in the Harvard Business Review!

In the latest issue, there is a solid article on various parts of what has become the lean startup movement.

By now, the "playbook " is familiar:
- Business model, not business plan driven
- Interdiscplinary product creation teams, not strictly split business and IT project organisations
- Minimum viable product, developed and launched incrementally (and not just iteratively) and updated regularly, not multi-year product development with too many moving parts
- Customer co-creation focused around customer journeys, not market research alone...

All the parts have been knocking around for a couple of decades and more.

So why is it that, despite everyone's best efforts, such joined up approaches are so infrequent in practice outside the startup space?

It is not as if startups have the monopoly on great people, or great ideas - in my experience there are no shortage of either in corporations the world over.

No doubt, corporate inertia is part of the problem and, of course, the shear complexity of the businesses they are in that have evolved over long periods of time.

Equally, the natural conservativism of well established organisations will play its part. But people in the largest corporations see what is happening around them and understand these well-trodden ideas as well as the next person (in his lean-startup) - so much so that the willingness to apply the methods is often there (and indeed at all levels), in even the largest organisations.

Honestly, I think the answer lies more in the ability to select the 1,2,3 really important improvements/ customer journeys/ products/ services/ processes/ whatever within the organisation and then keep up the focus on them for long enough to really improve them before moving on to the next challenge.

Sounds like a job for commercially driven business architecture combined with a genuinely empowered cross functional SWAT team, seeding the organisation.

But then I would say that, wouldn't I?


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