Entrepreneurship is a kind of management

Part three from my read of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

"Lately, it seems that one is cool, innovative, and exciting and the other is dull, serious and bland." He's talking about the how the words entrepreneurship and management go together.

In another startup Eric was involved in, IMVU, they went at it determined to make as many mistakes as they could. They shipped the product as soon as they cobbled something together, they charged people for it, and iterated often - sometimes several times per day. And in 2011 IMVU had revenues of $50 million.


From this experience, Ries distilled five principles:
1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. An entrepreneur is anyone who works with new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
2. Entrepreneurship is management. Startups require a management style geard to its context of extreme uncertainty.
3. Validated learning. In addition to making money, startups exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
4. Build-Measure-Lean. Startups should make the cycle of building products, measuring their success and learning from the experience as fast as possible.
5. Innovation accounting. The boring stuff is also importan, measuring progress, setting up milestones, and how to prioritize our work.


As I wrote earlier, I'm also reading The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. One of the three pillars of the one minute manager is one-minute goals. These are goals no longer than 250 words that the manager and the managee agree upon as the measure of a project's success. Principle five says the same thing, that measuring and comparing performance to goals is an important part of a startup. as well as in established companies.

Currently reading The One Minute Manager and the Lean Startup

I'm currently reading two classic books in the world of business. The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson is a guide to becoming a good manager. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a book about creating startups that achieve great things without being wasteful.

The One Minute Manager outlines three techniques that managers should use; one-minute goals, one-minute praises, and one-minute reprimands.

The Lean Startup is about Ries' five principles for building a lean startup; entrepreneurs are everywhere, entrepreneurship is management, validated learning, innovation accounting, and "build-measure-learn".

The One Minute Manager is a short story about a young man who stumbles on a guy called the one minute manager in his search for good leaders. I've gotten half way so far and it's instructions are good, if not surprising. I haven't read a lot form The Lean Startup yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out what "entrepreneurship is management" means.