Lean or Lean Startup

There’s a lot of hype around Lean Startup for at least the last year. The positive thing is that much of this hype is well-deserved; the concepts have changed the thinking of a lot of its readers. Having a foot in both camps as a lean practitioner improving services and organisations and as an entrepreneur roughly adhering to the Lean Startup method, I think it’s important that we are all clear on the difference between the concept of the lean startup method and lean organisation.

I like a lot of the concepts in The Lean Startup written by Eric Ries. However, from viewing social media conversations and articles, it appears that a lot of readers are confused as to what the focus is. It’s not about about creating a lean organisation (i.e. an organisation that operates in a lean manner). Instead it concerns creating an organisation in a lean manner, using a methodology analogous to Lean, itself largely based on TPS (Toyota Production System). The book doesn’t reflect how the organisation will operate. Fortunately, you would expect an organisation that was built using lean methods to have a better change of being lean itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily follow.

Now, enter The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits which is just going through pre-release. From the table of contents, this book does appear to discuss creating an organisation that will operate in a lean manner. While this is something that I would tend to do naturally, I look forward to reading the book and understanding how other people would approach the same challenge.