by Brant | Apr 21, 2021 | 21st Century Leadership, Innovation
The increased complexity and endless disruptions of the modern world brought on by the transition to the digital age means uncertainty is everywhere. All across our businesses, we face new challenges, as what used to work no longer achieves desired outcomes. The self-awareness of admitting what we don’t know is the first step toward figuring out new best practices. Fundamentally, people must act differently in the face of uncertainty. Businesses need to adopt learning strategies in order to improve, adapt, or even reinvent their execution strategies.
by Brant | Mar 24, 2021 | Innovation, Lean Innovation
Most big companies think technology when thinking about innovation, regardless of whether or not they’re technology companies. Startups are often considered to be de facto innovators, but is that the case? Marketing tends to have their own way of talking about innovation. Is there any Fortune 500 company that doesn’t talk about their innovation capabilities in their About Us section of their website?
by Brant | Feb 23, 2021 | 21st Century Leadership, Disruption Proof, Mindset Change
Obviously, Covid-19 has brought massive uncertainty to businesses. From managing remote workers, to internal communications dominated by video platforms, to the devastation of small business buyers and consumer budgets, the ‘new normal’ would have been barely recognizable at the beginning of 2020. Make no mistake, the pandemic disrupted business.
by Brant | Sep 12, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Startups, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development
As an early believer in Lean Startup movement, I can perhaps be excused for my unbridled enthusiasm for the release of Eric Ries’ new book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Not however, for the reasons you might expect.
In fact, some early adopters of Lean Startups — those who have already bought into the framework to the extent that they’ve applied its practices into their high tech startup — might be a tad disappointed. They might have to look a little deeper; there’s no vanity steps to success herein.
by Brant | Aug 29, 2011 | Customer Development, Lean Startup
Here’s what I submitted to Eric Ries as an idea for the cover of his upcoming book: For some reason, it didn’t get chosen. : ) Actually, it’s a just slide from my You are (not) a Visionary deck I presented at last week’s Wisconsin’s...
by Brant | Jul 26, 2011 | Brant's Rant, Lean Startup
As technologists working on new products and new markets, we tend to forget where we are on the technology adoption lifecycle curve. That’s a mistake. Here’s why: 1. Nobody cares See all that white space under the middle of the curve? Those are people...
by Brant | Dec 23, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Economy, Startups
The Innovator’s Dilemma not only forms the foundation of Lean Startups and Customer Development, but has brilliant analysis on the role of disruptive vs sustaining innovation in large successful businesses. In a nutshell, big successful companies successfully adopt sustaining technologies that maintain a steady trajectory of performance/cost improvements. These same companies, however, fail to adopt disruptive technologies that radically change performance/cost trajectories. The success of the former dictates the level of success of that business as long as the adopted trajectory is dominant in the marketplace. These businesses tend naturally to move “up market” to maintain or increase margins as the (IMO) traverse into late majority adoption in the technology adoption curve. If and when, however, the disruptive trajectories become dominant (for whatever reason) these same businesses fail, because they are unable to respond to the startups eating up their core business.
by Brant | Nov 11, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Economy, Lean Startup
If you follow high tech startups at all, it was virtually impossible to have missed all the discussions this summer regarding disruptions occurring in the startup environment, including the role of investors, the wisdom of “Lean startups,” and bemoaning...
by Brant | Jul 28, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Customer Development, Lean Startup
Now a couple of days away from the Lean Startup Machine startup weekend, I wanted to get down some initial thoughts on the event. When approached about participating in the event, I was immediately intrigued by the idea, as long as it took the lean startup principles...
by CustDevGuy | Mar 4, 2010 | Brant's Rant, Lean Startup, Startup Marketing
I attended the most recent Startup2Startup event and after the presentation, the discussion turned to how one might define Product-Market Fit and what might serve as a proxy for Product-Market Fit, given various types of business models. The Sean Ellis 40%...
