Thanks to Eric Ries and the organizers for Lean Startup Week for allowing me to share video of my 15-minute talk from last year's event.
One reason for sharing this today is to celebrate yesterday's initial release of the in-progress version of my book Measures of Success. If you buy the book now, you'll get a PDF of the first three chapters, or about 40% of the book's expected content.
Today is the start of the main two days of 2017’s Lean Startup Week event. I’m presenting tomorrow and doing the Red Bead Experiment. If you’re here, please say hi to me! You might be able to attend a live…
So many of our business metrics are reported in terms of two-data point comparisons. How much did the metric change from last week? Web site traffic is up 14% from last month. So that’s good? Maybe. Two data points…
TL;DR: Quality posters and slogans don’t improve performance–they signal that management expects people to “try harder” instead of fixing broken systems. As Deming taught, most quality problems come from management-controlled systems, not worker effort. Remove the posters. Substitute leadership. Back…
Here’s another post on the theme of performance metrics, as I’m talking about next week at Lean Startup Week (see yesterday’s post or others in this series). At the risk of becoming a broken record, it saddens me to see…
As next week’s Lean Startup Week approaches, I’m pretty laser focused on preparation for my: Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and the founder of this event, cited Dr. W. Edwards Deming multiple times in his first book The Lean Startup.…
As you might know from episode #290 of my podcast with Eric Ries on Monday, his new book was released on Tuesday: The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth. I think there are…
TL;DR: Cherry-picked metrics can make performance look better without actually improving it. Process Behavior Charts help leaders distinguish real improvement from noise, stop overreacting, and focus on improving the system instead of explaining fluctuations. What Is Success Theater? One of…
TL;DR: Leaders lose sleep because they react to every up and down in their metrics. Most fluctuations are just noise. Process Behavior Charts help filter noise, identify real signals, and focus leadership attention on meaningful improvement instead of constant firefighting.…
As Eric wrote about in The Lean Startup (and as many others say), time is the most precious commodity anybody has. I think that's true in startups and it's true in other organizations. Everybody says they don't have enough time. So, we have to use it wisely.
