The Lean Startup


Book Description

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.




The Lean Business Guidebook


Book Description

This book introduces a powerful system that explains how to run a company with a focus on continuous improvement. The results are a satisfied customer base, evolving products and an increase in revenue and profits. These factors determine the success for any company because business transformation involves making fundamental changes in how business is conducted to cope with shifts in the market environment. This a comprehensive book for valuable guidance on framing strategy and overcoming challenges for successful and sustainable implementation of a lean production system, daily management system and lean accounting system in companies to empower the managers to serve their customers with timely delivery of quality products while maximizing profits and easing workloads. The main challenge is ensuring operations colleagues in different functions understand the link between their daily work and the profit and loss statement. In addition, it illustrates how finance personnel can assist the operations team and be a part of the transformation journey. This book is not meant to impart theoretical knowledge of the lean production system, daily management and lean accounting, as there are many books already available that focus on the methodology instead of the implementation. This book empowers people in each function of a company, irrespective of which level they work in the company, and shows them the way to operate on a daily basis to achieve the company's strategy while simultaneously fulfilling their career goals. The book lays out a brief history of the evolution of lean concepts with a focus on lean accounting. This book guides the successful implementation and sustenance of lean and kaizen tools and provides answers to the questions: Who should lead the lean and kaizen implementation in the company? Where should the lean and kaizen journey begin? Which lean and kaizen tools should be implemented first? How important is capacity for the company? How much current capacity is wasted and how much free capacity is available? Where exactly are the resources being wasted in the company? How can the company reduce waste to release capacity for more production? Why should the daily management system and lean accounting system be implemented simultaneously with the lean production system? Why must managers understand the monetary value of their daily activities? Is there an easy way of making a profit and loss statement that is understood at each level in the company? Why is one-day closing of accounts important and how can it be done?




Ready, Launch, Brand


Book Description

"A powerful and urgent introduction to lean marketing and the magic of getting it right." -- Seth Godin, author, This is Marketing You may be familiar with the Silicon Valley expression about the iterative approach to software development, "We’re learning to fly the plane while we’re building it." If so, think of a startup—with all its moving parts, phases, and personalities—as flying a plane, while you’re building it, booking passengers, marketing the airline, interviewing co-pilots, and serving coffee. In this book, Orly Zeewy navigates the turbulence and provides a flight plan so you know when you’ve landed in the right airport. Orly Zeewy is a brand architect who helps startups cut through the noise. She has worked with dozens of founders and entrepreneurs to uncover their brands’ DNA. In Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups you will learn how to close the marketing gaps that can slow down sales and make it harder to scale your business. Orly shares her brand process for building the right team, attracting brand evangelists, and cultivating a sustainable company culture. Prior to starting her brand consulting practice, Orly ran the award-winning Zeewy Design and Marketing Communications firm and directed marketing programs for national clients such as CIGNA, Kraft Foods, and Prince Tennis. She has lectured at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, taught at the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University, and been featured in the business section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.







Lean Labor


Book Description

LEAN LABOR delivers practical methods to convert wasted time and expense into productive hours resulting in a highly effective workforce. In this book you will follow Graham, an operations executive at a manufacturing company, on his journey to uncover unique ways of applying Lean methodologies in managing the workforce. Filled with proven examples and case studies, LEAN LABOR will inspire new ideas and deliver a roadmap that all manufacturers can follow to improve their global competitiveness.




Running Lean


Book Description

Offers a systematic approach to product/market fit, discussing customer involvment, optimal time to obtain funding, and when to change the plan.




The Wall Street Journal Complete Small Business Guidebook


Book Description

The country's most-trusted source for financial information offers business and lifestyle strategies that can help turn small-business dreams into sustainable successes.




Lean Thinking


Book Description

Lean Thinking was launched in the fall of 1996, just in time for the recession of 1997. It told the story of how American, European, and Japanese firms applied a simple set of principles called 'lean thinking' to survive the recession of 1991 and grow steadily in sales and profits through 1996. Even though the recession of 1997 never happened, companies were starving for information on how to make themselves leaner and more efficient. Now we are dealing with the recession of 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2002. So what happened to the exemplar firms profiled in Lean Thinking? In the new fully revised edition of this bestselling book those pioneering lean thinkers are brought up to date. Authors James Womack and Daniel Jones offer new guidelines for lean thinking firms and bring their groundbreaking practices to a brand new generation of companies that are looking to stay one step ahead of the competition.




The Lean Product Playbook


Book Description

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.




Real Numbers


Book Description

How management accounting evolved with Lean principles.