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2018 | Buch

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Spinning into Control

Improvising the Sustainable Startup

verfasst von: Amiel Kornel

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book encourages startup founders to maintain control of their destiny by obsessively perfecting their startup’s story and key relationships as much as its initial product or service. It highlights the importance of improvisation in the incubation of startups.

Startup founders hoping to master their destinies develop the skills of venture craftsmen, learning to behave more like explorers and artisans than managers and engineers. The improvisational arts of tinkering, wandering, and conversing overcome the limitations of scientifically based “lean” methodologies for creating startups. These skills provide wobbly, nascent ventures with stability and conserve momentum during early-stage incubation. Like the gimbals of a gyroscope, they counter the entropy born of change, conflict and confusion that is continuously pushing young enterprises towards chaos. As their startups spin, venture craftsmen actually loosen the coupling between command and control. Startup sustainability relies on relentless improvisation, the heart of the art of entrepreneurship. Vignettes in each chapter of Spinning Into Control relate hardscrabble stories of entrepreneurs, craftsmen and venturers — some recently interviewed by the author, others historical — recounting the challenges they faced, their responses, the lessons they learned, and the eventually triumphant outcomes.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. Ode to the Venture Craftsman

Abstract

The opening chapter introduces the “venture craftsman” as a model for success in startup incubation. Like explorers, venture craftsmen wander through uncharted markets and bring back precious discoveries in the hope of generating riches for themselves and their backers. And, like artisans, they take time to tinker, shaping each element of their startup business with exacting attention to detail and excellence. They fashion skills, tools and other specialized assets that help them create businesses of enduring value.

The chapter also introduces the three skills supporting a startup founder’s journey through this often hidden “stealth” phase of a startup’s life: wandering, conversing, tinkering. At the heart of each lies improvisation, the real-time fusion of thought and action, design and execution. These improvisational skills help overcome the limitations of scientifically based “lean” methodologies for creating startups. They provide wobbly, nascent ventures with stability and conserve momentum during early-stage incubation. Like the gimbals of a gyroscope, they counter the entropy born of change, conflict, and confusion, which continuously push young enterprises toward chaos.

Amiel Kornel

2. Mastering the Art of Tinkering

Abstract

Tinkering is the first of three core skills that venture craftsmen perfect over time, through which they engage in a tactile and kinesthetic dialogue with tools, resources, and potential products or services. While still exploring as-yet poorly understood opportunities, they handcraft loosely defined prototypes to accelerate learning and improve design. Iterating architecture, capabilities, components and appearance, they adapt primitive prototypes to lessons learned about markets, technical feasibility and the economics of building a viable business. Prototypes help spin the venture’s intelligence-generating “learning loop.”

Ultimately, tinkering helps make a startup self-sustaining and fault-tolerant. As learning accelerates and incubation skills and tools improve, the likelihood that venture craftsmen will craft a winning business grows. As execution and market uncertainties diminish, prototype sophistication and precision rise until concepts are ready to be engineered as commercial products.

Amiel Kornel

3. Mastering the Art of Conversing

Abstract

Conversing, the second core skill of venture craft, helps grow and harvest social capital during startup incubation. Founders balance the yin of advocacy and selling with the yang of listening and dialogue.

Active listening, not talking, offers the straightest route to emotional connection with existing and potential stakeholders. It helps build rapport with co-founders, staff, investors and advisors by signaling a wish to have a meaningful conversation.

Building on listening, conversations acknowledge differences and divergences. The goal is not necessarily to find common ground, a squishy marsh of compromises and concessions that dilute excellence. In addition to helping the venture craftsman overcome a fear of losing control, the civility, respectful silences and (hopefully) win-win outcome of a well-improvised conversation can make the joint undertaking more pleasurable for everyone involved.

Amiel Kornel

4. Mastering the Art of Wandering

Abstract

Wandering, the third core skill of venture craft, helps uncover an authentic opportunity, which is the single biggest challenge facing startups. Founders struggling through incubation follow a winding, non-linear path of discovery in search of early adopters.

Uncovering an opportunity—that is, just reaching the “chasm” that precedes mainstream adoption—can be confounding for two reasons. Firstly, customers can neither exhaustively describe the products they desire nor reliably predict whether they would actually pay for them if built. And secondly, due to cognitive limitations we all experience, innovators rarely can objectively investigate and analyze market opportunities and potential business models alone. Only by progressively replacing assumptions with data and by inviting mentors and others to challenge interpretations of the data can innovators overcome biases and blind spots.

Amiel Kornel

5. The Improvisational Startup

Abstract

When undertaking to incubate a startup, many founders find adaptive “lean” planning difficult to initialize, unhelpful or simply contrary to their management style. They struggle to uncover a novel seed idea or hypothesis. Or they struggle to envision an attractive solution or profitable enterprise that might realize their mission. Planning may feel unnatural. These venture craftsmen prefer to collapse planning, design, execution and learning into a single creative act. Instead of thoughtfully iterating, they prefer to spin.

Entrepreneurial improvisation upends the adaptive model of continuous planning, experimentation and learning. Hypotheses become less critical, as does the scientific method. When mastered, a founder using improvisation to incubate her startup behaves more like a jazz musician, artisan, software hacker, or even a battlefield warrior than a manager or engineer.

Amiel Kornel

6. Making Do

Abstract

There’s a new mantra emerging from Silicon Valley: Strive to become self-sustaining early. This is quite a departure from past exhortations to scale quickly and at any cost. Now some investors actually urge founders to achieve profitability sooner rather than later, husband available resources and grow new assets organically, at least until proving themselves capable of delivering products of enduring value for viable markets. At that point, funders will more likely invest at valuations that aren’t overly dilutive. The founding team retains control longer.

Resourcefulness boosts control more than wealth. It begins with the very intentional art of making do, that is, bootstrapping a new venture by maximizing the utility of resources in hand. This chapter looks at how we can unpack the concept of “making do” to make it actionable.

Amiel Kornel

7. Making New

Abstract

Making new by tinkering, wandering, listening and conversing also requires resourcefulness. Venture craftsmen recombine, reconfigure and repurpose in novel ways existing ideas, methods, materials, software and content. With these hacks and mashups, they make new while making do.

By continually handcrafting prototypes of products and marketing campaigns and engaging in dialogue with stakeholders and customers, venture craftsmen create discovery spaces to wander and wonder about new opportunities and winning business models. Doing—more than thinking—guides exploration.

Adaptive “lean” planning and the improvisational arts of venture craft share a bias towards action that refuses to wait for resources to reach a desired level; a readiness to use whatever relationships, know-how and resources are on hand; and an inventive and even playful approach to recombining existing assets and resources in novel ways.

Amiel Kornel

8. Blending Art and Science

Abstract

Previous chapters explored the under-appreciated arts of entrepreneurship. But the scientific method certainly plays an important role as well. Hypothesis-based approaches—with metrics, milestones, roadmaps and timelines—enable a more efficient use of resources as well as better communication and alignment between stakeholders. Venture craftsmen coordinate ad hoc activities with activites relying on planning and experimentation. Art and science merge. The need of startup founders to marry the two is no different from the need of explorers and artisans to combine improvisation and method.

Even as they methodically advance towards successive, predefined milestones, improvisational skills alert venture craftsmen to discrepancies, variations and errors in evolving plans as well as uncover emerging opportunities. They occasionally tinker even as they build advanced prototypes; take the time to engage stakeholders in open-ended conversations even as they rush to mobilize resources; and freely wander into adjacencies even as they focus on chosen markets and business models.

Adaptive planning and experimentation—whether by applying lean methodologies; milestone mapping framework; or other iterative, hypothesis-driven approaches—are necessary but insufficient for achieving sustainable success. As a result, venture craftsmen run their startups as artisanal studios that combine the art and science of entrepreneurship. The startup studio uses an incubation platform—skills, tools, methods and deliverables that help founders and their teams iterate from failure to success. Continuous learning, both planned and improvised, underpins sustainability.

Amiel Kornel

9. Epilogue: The Failsafe Entrepreneur

Abstract

Venture craftsmen have a productive relationship with adversity and failure: they view both as learning opportunities, challenges to be surpassed and engines of discovery. They accept the hard reality that many, if not most, startups will fail. Perhaps a startup’s mission was unrealistic or ahead of its time or competitors won the race or cash and energy simply dried up. The question facing the founder then becomes whether or not to try again.

Serial entrepreneurs account for roughly 10–13% of startup founders in the US. The ones bound to eventually succeed, those which are “failsafe,” continuously hone their incubation skills, cultivate relationships, gain maturity and wisdom with each setback, and remain energized by the sheer excitement of undertaking a new startup adventure.

Amiel Kornel

Backmatter

Titel: Spinning into Control
verfasst von: Amiel Kornel
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-51356-4
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51355-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51356-4