The Second Wave of Lean Startup Books: Scaling Lean and The Leader’s Guide
The fathers of Lean Startup, Eric Ries (The Lean Startup, the Build Measure Learn loop) and Ash Maurya (Running Lean; the Lean Canvas tool) have been at it again.
While Ries writes about how a large organization can establish a culture of leveraging lean startup principles, Maurya has gone on to focus on scaling the core process itself, introducing an interesting concept of the Customer Factory Blueprint, borrowing ideas from the Theory of Constraints.
Both topics (Lean Enterprise and Lean Startup Metrics / Lean Analytics) have been written about before, but it’s always interesting to hear from the pioneers themselves.
"Are they worth my time?”, you might be asking. Depends on what you’re looking for and what you’ve read before. There’s a lot of books (most likely even better than ‘The Leader’s Guide’) regarding using Lean Startup in a large organization, so Ries’ book will most likely be useful only if you’re very interested in the topic – say, if you’d be building an internal accelerator or working actively with developing corporate culture.
Knowing how to focus laser sharp is a core requirement for a startup with scarce resources. Ash Maurya seems to have something very interesting here regarding that topic. So if you’re building a scalable growth business (i.e. not consulting), “Scaling Lean” might give you much needed help in focusing your efforts. Also, be sure to read “Lean Analytics” (4.08 / 5.00 stars on Goodreads)
Since I haven’t read either of the books yet, as the mailman just brought them, here’s some other people on how they like the books:
Huffpost on “The Leader’s Guide”
Goodreads reviews on “The Leader’s Guide” (3.60 / 5.00 stars)
Kevin DeWalt reviews “Scaling Lean”
Goodreads reviews on “Scaling Lean” (4.73 / 5.00 stars)