Steve Blank

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Entrepreneurial Management Stack
Over the last few years we’ve discovered that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. The skills founders need are not covered by traditional books for MBA’s and large company managers. There are now a few books that specifically address founders needs. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is the first book that allows you to answer “What’s your business model?” intelligently and with precision. Make sure this one is on your shelf.

Eric Ries was the best student I ever had. He took the Customer Development process, combined it with Agile Engineering, and actually did the first implementation in a startup. His insights about the combined Customer Development/Agile process and its implications past startups into large corporations is a sea change in thinking. His book, The Lean Startup is a “must have” for your shelf.

It’s impossible to implement any of this if you don’t understand Agile Development. Extreme Programming Explained by one of the pioneers of Agile, Kent Beck, is a great tutorial. If you don’t understand Values, Principles and Practices in XP it makes Customer Development almost impossible.

If you’re in a large company, The Other Side of Innovation makes sense of how to actually insert innovation into an execution organization.  If you’re starting a medical device company Biodesign:The Process of  Innovating Medical Technologies is a must have. It has a great customer discovery process.

• Business Model Generation: by Alexander Osterwalder
• The Lean Startup: by Eric Ries
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck
• the other side of innovation - Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
• Biodesign: The Process of  Innovating Medical Technologies by Zenios, Makower, Yock, et al  (great website here)
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany:

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And my newest book, The Startup Owners Manual

Order Print or Kindle Version Here

and don’t forget

The Founders Workbook – The Checklist Companion to the Startup Owners Manual

Must Read Books

The other side of innovation is the closest receipe I’ve read for getting entrepnreurship right in large companies. Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution helped me refine the notion of the Four types of Startup Markets.  I read these books as the handbook for startups trying to disrupt an established company. The Innovators DNA rings true about the skills founders need to have. Crossing the Chasm made me understand that there are repeatable patterns in early stage companies. It started my search for the repeatable set of patterns that preceded the chasm.  The Tipping Point has made me realize that marketing communications strategies for companies in New Markets often follow the Tipping Point. Blue Ocean Strategy is a great way to look at what I’ve called “market type.”

• the other side of innovation - Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
• The Innovator’s Dilemma & The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators - Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
• Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge
• Dealing with Darwin : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution  — all three by Geoffrey A. Moore
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by R. Mauborgne and W. C. Kim

Strategy Books for Startups

The Marketing Playbook gives marketers five strategy options, teaches you gap analysis and offer tactical marketing campaign advice. Do More Faster identifies issues that first-time entrepreneurs encounter and offer useful advice. Getting Real is web-focussed. Wasserman’s Founders Dilemma is essential reading to building a great startup team.

These books are classics but timeless. The Entrepreneurial Mindset articulates the critically important idea that there are different types of startup opportunities.  The notion of three Market Types springs from here and Christensen’s work.  The book provides a framework for the early marketing/sales strategies essential in a startup.  Delivering Profitable Value talks more about value propositions and value delivery systems than you ever want to hear again.  However, this is one of the books you struggle through and then realize you learned something valuable. Schumpeter’s book Theory of Economic Development is famous for his phrase “creative destruction”  and its relevance to entrepreneurship. Peter Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation was the first insiders view of how a decentralized company (GM) works. His Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a classic. While written for a corporate audience, read it for the sources of innovation. If you write software you already know about Fred Brooks classic text the Mythical Man Month. If you manage a software company you need to read it so you don’t act like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Peppers and Rogers, The One to One Future opened my eyes to concepts of lifetime value, most profitable customers and the entire customer lifecycle of “get, keep and grow.” Bill Davidow’s Marketing High Technology introduced me to the concept of “whole product” and the unique needs of mainstream customers. Michael Porter is the father of competitive strategy. His books Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage, and On Competition are still the standards.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Enterprise

How large companies can stay innovative and entrepreneurial has been the Holy Grail for authors of business books, business schools, consulting firms, etc.  There’s some great work from lots of authors in this area but I’d start by reading the other side of innovation. Next I’d read The Future of Mangement and consider its implications.

Then I’d read the short Harvard Business Review articles. Eric Von Hippel work on new product introduction methodologies and the notion of “Lead Users” offer many parallels with Customer Discovery and Validation. But like most books on the subject it’s written from the point of view of a large company. Von Hippel’s four steps of 1) goal generation and team formation, 2) trend research, 3) lead user pyramid networking and 4) Lead User workshop and idea improvement is a more rigorous and disciplined approach then suggested in our book, the Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Books

• the other side of innovation - Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
• Innovators Dilemma & Innovator Solution, Clayton Christensen
• The Future of Management - Gary Hamel
• Winning Through Innovation: a Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal, Charles O’Reilly
• Breakthrough Products with Lead User Research by Eric Von Hippel and Mary Sonnack
• The Sources of Innovation by Eric Von Hippel

Harvard Business Review Articles

• Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change, Clayton Christensen/Michael Overdorf: March/April 2000
• The Quest for Resilience, Gary Hamel/Liisa Valikangas: Sept 2003
• The Ambidextrous Organization, Charles O’Reilly/Michael Tushman: April 2004
• Darwin and the Demon: Innovating Within Established Enterprises, Geoffrey Moore: July/August 2004
• Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship, David Garvin/Lynne Levesque: Oct 2006
• The Innovators DNA, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton Christensen: Dec 2009

“War as Strategy” Books

The metaphor that business is war is both a cliché and points to a deeper truth.  Many basic business concepts; competition, leadership, strategy versus tactics, logistics, etc. have their roots in military affairs. The difference is that in business no one dies.  At some time in your business life you need to study war or become a casualty.  Sun Tzu covered all the basics of strategy in The Art of War until the advent of technology temporarily superseded him. Also, in the same vein try The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.  These two books have unfortunately turned into business clichés but they are still timeless reading.  Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War is a 19th century western attempt to understand war. The “Boyd” book, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War is a biography and may seem out of place here, but John Boyd’s OODA loop is at the core of Customer Development and the Pivot. Read it and then look at all the web sites for Boyd papers, particularly Patterns of Conflict. The New Lanchester Strategy is so offbeat that it tends to be ignored.  Its ratios of what you require to attack or defend a market keep coming up so often in real life, that I’ve found it hard to ignore.

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary, or the one by Griffith
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• On War by Carl Von Clausewitz’s  Everyman’s Library Series
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram and/or
• The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant T. Hammond
• Lanchester Strategy: An Introduction by Taoka and/or