Thinking About Starting a Business? Read This

With the U.S. and global economy pretty much stuck on stupid, and upwards of 15 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, rightfully, many are faced with creating their own job rather than joining the topsy turvy job market again. 


But, most new business startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.  Enter "The Lean Startup", EricRies' latest book, which offers a fresh new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.  


Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom.
What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.


For those expecting a detailed step-by-step roadmap of the Lean Startup, you're likely to be disappointed.  The subject is simply too large to be covered in one book, and many of the individual concepts have already been covered in other sources, which Ries does a great job of suggesting.  Importantly, this book is not a laundry list of steps on the path to success, and the book never presents itself as such.  What it does do is lay out a framework with which you should approach your startup, and some specific considerations that need to be made throughout its evolution.  That in itself makes this book worth checking out.