The Startup Way

In the wake of the great success of The Lean Startup Method book, companies have begun to wonder if they can use the same Lean Startup Method techniques to keep their organizations from slowing down and becoming bureaucratic as they grow.

The author has therefore devised a series of principles that can be applied after the launch phase of a company, combining the rigor of general management with the strongly repetitive nature of startups.

The five basic principles of The Startup Method are:

• Continuous innovation: long-term growth needs a method to constantly find innovations, drawing from creativity and talent at every level of the company.
• Startup as Atomic Unit of Work: in order to create continuous cycles of innovation, companies must have teams dedicated to experimenting and research. These teams are like internal startups and need different organizational structures to differentiate them.
• The missing function : the management of startups within a business ecosystem can bewilder a traditional system. Most companies do not cover this fundamental role in their organizational system, entrepreneurial spirit, which is as vital as marketing, finance and other traditional sectors.
• The second founding: deeply transforming a business structure is somewhat like re-launching it.
• Continuous transformation: all this requires the development of a new skill: the ability to rewrite the company's DNA in response to new and different challenges. Once the transformation has been implemented, it is worth moving forward.

This does not mean that each and every team has to reorganize itself according to the principles of the startup or that each employee is going to magically start working like an entrepreneur.

The goal is to ensure that the team works reliably and that all employees have the opportunity to act in an entrepreneurial way.

At the same time, managers must become experts in entrepreneurial management to guide the team more successfully.