Lean Startups: Learning Over Working Software « The Hacker Chick Blog The Agile Manifesto, which we created to uncover better ways of developing software, says, We value Working Software over Documentation And we do. We’d much rather have actual, real live, working software then reams of documentation proclaiming all the great stuff this as-of-yet-nonexistent software is going to do at some point in the future. However, agile is also about learning and adapting. We value Learning over Working Software Agile helps us develop software as efficiently as possible – we can bang out quality code really fast with it. Startups aren’t just small versions of large organizations. “The unit of progress for entrepreneurs is learning, not execution.” – Eric Ries “Lean Startups are driven by a compelling vision, and are rigorous about testing each element of this vision against reality.” – Eric Ries We want to focus on the fundamental feedback loop between when we have an idea and when we’ve learned whether or not our idea makes sense. Eliminate Waste.
Looking to Join the Lean Start-up Movement? - Scott Anthony by Scott Anthony | 12:00 PM April 26, 2013 I love Lean. In my eyes, the work Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and others have done to provide a cogent, accessible frame around the academic concepts of emergent strategy is one of the most important contributions to the innovation movement over the past few years. I have repeatedly stated that the next wave of innovation will come from companies that harness the transformational power that too often lies latent inside their organizations. If I had a quibble with lean techniques it is with the extreme perspective that some practitioners take that research and thinking are useless — that learning comes only from developing prototypes and testing in-market. Consider the research Jeff Bezos did before he founded Amazon.com that led him to focus on books rather than music, clothing, or electronic appliances. Of course, the value of a tool depends on its application. Create mechanisms to enable experiments.
Agile Vs. Lean: Yeah Yeah, What’s the Difference? « The Hacker Chick Blog Is Agile the same as Lean? When people say “agile” do they really mean Scrum? Or do people still use different types of agile – and if so, why? Been getting a lot of questions lately, so thought I’d take a stab at this… Lean comes from Lean Manufacturing and is a set of principles for achieving quality, speed & customer alignment (same as what we’re trying to do with agile development, right?). Mary & Tom Poppendieck adapted the principles from Lean Manufacturing to fit software development and I believe these ideas actually provide the premises behind why agile works: In a nutshell, Lean says to relentlessly eliminate anything that isn’t adding value and only work on what we absolutely need to be doing at this moment in time. Lean also puts a very strong emphasis on what it calls “the system” – that is, the way that the team operates as a whole. Along those lines, Lean says to respect that the people doing the work are the ones that best know how to do it. And it’s principles are:
Xerox's CMO on Leading by Example in Social Media - Christa Carone by Christa Carone | 11:00 AM April 26, 2013 A year ago I decided to become an active content creator and social media contributor. I wanted to show our teams at Xerox how a social program could help change perceptions of our brand. Many still think of Xerox as a copier company, but the majority of our revenue now comes from business process outsourcing. I’ll be honest; playing guinea pig required time that is scarce these days. Another issue: Our executive team is proud of the Xerox brand presence in the social space, but we have a team-oriented, humble culture. I set out to connect with communications professionals and marketing thought leaders, the most relevant audience for me as a marketing executive. Where to start? Twitter felt like a more natural place to kick start dialogue — my target audience was fluent in 140 characters. My social participation has generated more speaking invitations, which led to one of my favorite moments of the year. Don’t boil the ocean. Be conversational.
lean process Figure It Out Big companies should keep their eyes on start-ups, and not only because of the disruptive innovations they unleash. It also pays to learn from how they work. For example, at GE our new-product development efforts got a fresh infusion of energy this year from the lean start-up methods that serial tech entrepreneur Eric Ries advocates. We’ve also been inspired by an ethos we’ve seen in the world of social enterprise: the belief that if you hire smart people, they should be able to “figure it out.” That’s a favorite phrase of Angela Blanchard, the CEO of Neighborhood Centers, a Houston-based nonprofit that provides services for 340,000 people along the Gulf Coast. Sometimes when candidates who want to join Neighborhood Centers learn of Blanchard’s expectations, they start to worry that they lack the training to take on such complex challenges. This is how a resourceful GE team in India was able to build medical equipment that can function despite intermittent electricity.
Marketers, Let Your Egos Go - Mitch Joel by Mitch Joel | 2:00 PM April 25, 2013 What if your ideas didn’t matter? For senior marketers, it is a very humbling thought. What if your ideas, your thoughts and even your experience as a trained marketing professional didn’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of the brand’s actual advertising performance? Let’s take a step back. It’s not just the emotional resonance of his pitch and delivery that touches us, but the core insight that he is able to uncover and express. Traditional advertisers will tell you that not much has changed. Emerging trends show some fascinating moves in advertising that together paint a powerful and picture as to just how much advertising has changed and how much more change is about to occur. First, younger digital natives, are becoming increasingly comfortable sharing their personal data online so long as they are deriving a value from the exchange. Our thinking as marketers needs to shift from “Mad Men” to “math men.”
What to Do When You've Made Someone Angry - Peter Bregman I was running late. My wife Eleanor and I had agreed to meet at the restaurant at seven o’clock and it was already half past. I had a good excuse in the form of a client meeting that ran over and I wasted no time getting to the dinner as fast as possible. When I arrived at the restaurant, I apologized and told her I didn’t mean to be late. She answered: “You never mean to be late.” “Sorry,” I retorted, “but it was unavoidable.” That dinner didn’t turn out to be our best. Several weeks later, when I was describing the situation to a friend of mine, Ken Hardy, a professor of family therapy, he smiled. “You made a classic mistake,” he told me. “Me? “Yes. In other words, I was focused on my intention while Eleanor was focused on the consequences. The more I thought about what Ken said, the more I recognized that this battle — intention vs. consequences — was the root cause of so much interpersonal discord. As it turns out, it’s not the thought that counts or even the action that counts.
How to Really Understand Someone Else's Point of View - Mark Goulston and John Ullmen by Mark Goulston and John Ullmen | 9:00 AM April 22, 2013 The most influential people strive for genuine buy in and commitment — they don’t rely on compliance techniques that only secure short-term persuasion. That was our conclusion after interviewing over 100 highly respected influences across many different industries and organizations for our recent book. These high-impact influencers follow a pattern of four steps that all of us can put into action. To understand why this step is so important, imagine that you’re at one end of a shopping mall — say, the northeast corner, by a cafe. Now, picture yourself saying, “To get to where I am, start in the northeast corner by a cafe.” Yet that’s how we often try to convince others — on our terms, from our assumptions, and based on our experiences. Like in the shopping mall example, we make a mistake by starting with how we see things (“our here”). Situational Awareness: Show that You Get “It.” Am I getting who this person is?
Creativity in Advertising: When It Works and When It Doesn’t Ask a professional in the business what the key to success is in advertising, and you’ll most likely get an answer that echoes the mantra of Stephan Vogel, Ogilvy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer: “Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a fan community...faster.” But are creative ads more effective in inspiring people to buy products than ads that simply catalogue product attributes or benefits? Numerous laboratory experiments have found that creative messages get more attention and lead to positive attitudes about the products being marketed, but there’s no firm evidence that shows how those messages influence purchase behavior. Drawing on research in communications psychology, we have developed a consumer survey approach for measuring perceived creativity along five dimensions. What Is Creativity? Originality.