The Lean Startup Newsletter - November 5, 2014

The Lean Startup Newsletter - November 5, 2014 by Eric Ries

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11/05/2014

Now that a growing number of established organizations are embracing the Lean Startup methodology, it’s worth remembering how rare it was even just a few years ago for large companies to work in this way.Intuit was the first major enterprise to contact me to express their interest in Lean Startup, and in this month’s Fast Company, founder Scott Cook discusses their decision to, whenever it's reasonable to, replace "decision by persuasion" with "decision by experimentation."“As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better… But I found myself saying, "Boy, you know, a lot of those decisions--decisions I made, decisions I participated in, decisions we took to our board--many of those decisions weren't very good... You had to say that we didn't have the batting average that we imagined in our minds that we did.”Here are some other articles that caught my attention this week:Where the jobs come from

Forbes reported surprising new research from the Kauffman Foundation and the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity about how jobs are created: “Over the last twenty five years, almost all of the private sector jobs have been created by businesses less than five years old.”

“The American government will be whatever we all make of it.”Susan Dominus interviewed Megan Smith, chief technology office for the United States (and former Google executive), for the New York Times Magazine. Smith urged young people to consider government as a career path: “If you come, you can bring your own methods. The American government will be whatever we all make of it.”Building churches using Lean StartupAdjunct professor at Denver Seminary and author Eric Swanson wrote a thoughtful piece about how to use Lean Startup to build new churches: "Ries defines a startup as 'a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.' Is there a better definition of a church startup?"

Volunteering at the Lean Startup ConferenceWe're looking for student volunteers to help at the LeanStartup Conference. If that's you, fill out this short form.Cheers,Eric

Eric Rieshttps://twitter.com/ericrieshttp://www.startuplessonslearned.com