Lean Strategy Start-ups need both agility and direction.
Strategy and entrepreneurship are often viewed as polar
opposites. Strategy is seen as the pursuit of a clearly defined path—one
systematically identified in advance—through a carefully chosen set of
activities. Entrepreneurship is seen as the epitome of opportunism—requiring
ventures to pivot in new directions continually, as information comes in and
markets shift rapidly. Yet the two desperately need each other. Strategy
without entrepreneurship is central planning. Entrepreneurship without strategy
leads to chaos.
What many entrepreneurs fail to grasp is that rather
than suppressing entrepreneurial behavior, effective strategy encourages it—by
identifying the bounds within which innovation and experimentation should take
place. But executives who want their established firms to be more
entrepreneurial often don’t fully appreciate how stage-gate processes,
multiple-horizon planning, and other corporate tools for managing strategic
growth initiatives can undermine innovation.
The reality is, integrating the bottom-up approach of
lean start-ups with the top-down orientation of strategic management remains
devilishly hard. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?
Yes. The solution is something I call a lean strategy
process, which guards against the extremes of both rigid planning and
unrestrained experimentation.
It emerged from the more than 20 years I’ve spent
studying and working with entrepreneurial ventures and large companies. In this
framework, strategy provides overall direction and alignment. It serves as both
a screen that novel ideas must pass and a yardstick for evaluating the success
of experiments with them. Strategy allows—indeed, encourages—frontline
employees to be creative, while ensuring that they remain on the same page with
the rest of the organization and pursue only worthwhile opportunities.
The
Entrepreneur’s Challenge
Howard H. Stevenson of Harvard Business School defines
entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources
currently controlled.” This highlights the fundamental challenge confronting
entrepreneurs: They all suffer from a shortage of money, talent, intellectual
property, access to distribution, and so on. While acquiring additional
external resources is partly the answer, the internal challenge is to wisely
shepherd, conserve, and deploy the resources the venture does possess. That is
exactly what strategy is all about. Indeed, the single best piece of advice for
any company builder is this: Know what not to do. Strategy helps you figure that
out.
Much more so than leaders of established firms,
entrepreneurs need to recognize these fundamental principles:
The
opportunity cost of doing A is that you cannot also do B. In
a resource-constrained venture, choices are mutually exclusive. If you allocate
two software engineers to customize a product for a new customer, you will
delay the release of version 2.0 of the product by three months. No amount of
experimentation will get around this problem.
Every
choice creates a unique path with a different outcome and unforeseen
implications. This is why you cannot simply do A now and
B later—because circumstances will almost certainly have changed. Competitors
will have launched their own version 2.0. Key suppliers will have signed
contracts that commit all their capacity to others. Potential customers’
judgments about the service will already be clouded by their experience with a
competitor’s version. The employee who would have been instrumental in pursuing
B will have left the company. Every choice is an irrevocable rejection of
something else.
Decisions
are interdependent. If John in marketing does A, it has
ramifications for Peter in product development, and vice versa. Any venture
needs to ensure that the scarcest resource—people’s time—is spent on the tasks
that are critical to the organization as a whole, not just to one department.
In an established firm, operating units are subject to many organizational
constraints: the brand’s positioning, a shared sales force, and so on. Those
constraints help ensure consistency among initiatives and innovations. A new
venture, however, lacks organizational parameters; the world is its oyster.
This makes it even more important for entrepreneurs to set boundaries.
Simple
market tests aren’t always useful. The lean start-up camp
celebrates agility and adaptation through rapid testing. That may be an
effective way to innovate incrementally and fine-tune an offering’s fit with
the market, but some ideas simply cannot be evaluated in a series of quick,
cheap experiments. Though few concepts require all-or-nothing investments, as
the launch of Federal Express did, many do entail substantial up-front
expenditures. Innovations that bring to market truly novel products and
services, like steel minimills and electric cars, often involve building
complete ecosystems and require long-term investments.
While adoption rates are accelerating (Facebook
achieved 100 million users in just over four years, WhatsApp in two years),
some businesses will mature more slowly. Customers may need time to appreciate
the value of a new product, or suppliers may need to work down a cost or
experience curve to deliver at a reasonable price. Businesses such as
accountable care organizations in health care and Tesla’s lithium ion batteries
would never have gotten off the ground had they been expected to demonstrate
immediate success.
What’s more, quick A/B tests that capture customer
preferences may fail to account for various alternatives’ longer-run impact on
brand reputation and purchasing behavior. Such tests also focus too heavily on
initial usage. Sometimes immediate traction with target customers is ephemeral:
Users tire of the novelty or—like Groupon’s customers—find that repeated use is
uneconomical. This is one reason that consumer-packaged-goods firms are careful
to distinguish trial from repeated use.
How
Strategy Can Help
In a world governed by the principles discussed here, a
strategy that articulates the firm’s overall direction is indispensable. It
helps entrepreneurs do four things:
Choose
a viable opportunity. Rigorous strategic analysis can
distinguish markets that promise enduring success from those that offer only
the illusion of substantial, if immediate, returns. Many a new firm has failed
because it pursued the latter. The archetypal example is a business with low
barriers to entry. Consider Groupon again. Its innovative model of online
coupons for local retailers and service providers quickly generated sales.
Unfortunately, anyone and her mother could also launch such a site—and did.
Demand for the service proved transitory, and no one has made any money in the
business.
Yes, an entrepreneur can make a quick killing by
starting such a business and then selling it to a strategic (or foolish) buyer.
A classic example is Minnetonka. It brought to market a series of
innovations—from Softsoap to the pump dispenser for toothpaste—that had no
protection from copycats. Yet as the first mover, the company could grow
rapidly before selling out to established firms: ColgatePalmolive bought its
soft-soap business, and Unilever bought the other product lines. However, this
business model still reflects a strategic choice: Knowing that the business
cannot be sustainable, the entrepreneur does everything possible to minimize
long-term commitments and maximize the gross margin and sales while looking for
the exit.
Another misstep is entering a large and growing market
without analyzing whether the firm will be able to build a sustainable
competitive advantage in it. Best Buy, Mattel’s line of Barbie dolls, eBay, and
a slew of others entered China thinking that anyone could make money there—only
to fail. It may be much wiser to pursue several smaller, less risky
opportunities that together could create a successful long-term business.
An initial strategic screen can save a venture from
going down the wrong path: one that might be readily validated by a market test
of a minimum viable product but is unlikely to support a long-term business. At
Eleet, a start-up based in Providence, Rhode Island, the founders (one of whom
is my son) initially developed eight possible B2B and B2C use cases for their
concept, providing chauffeurs to drive you in your own car. For a few hundred
thousand dollars, the team could have rapidly tested some of those use cases.
But before trying out even one, the founders analyzed the target markets and
recognized that a B2B version would be the most sustainable. As a result, they
set aside the B2C use cases and instead ran tests that demonstrated the
existence of high-volume B2B users, firms that would provide the service to
their employees in lieu of limousine service. They’re now in the early stages
of trying to build that business.
Stay
focused on the prize. Ventures that lack strategic bounds try to
do too much and spread themselves too thin. Because they fail to concentrate
their available resources, they can’t win in any key market.
Sophia Amoruso, founder of Nasty Gal, initially
succeeded in building a business that resold vintage clothing on eBay. Then she
diversified into a variety of new activities: selling brand-name designer
clothing; a magazine; an autobiography (#GirlBoss) and promotional book tour;
retail stores; international websites; and branded products such as shoes,
swimwear, lingerie, and home goods. Seduced by an overabundance of
opportunities, she threw a lot of ideas against the wall to see what would
stick. But with no clear focus, employees stumbled over one another, competing
for resources—including Amoruso’s attention—and growth stalled. She stepped
down as CEO in January 2015.
In a similar manner, new ventures—driven by the need to
generate cash to meet payroll—often respond to every sales inquiry, even when
the customer is not in the target set. In its start-up phase, Picis, a
health-care information-systems company, was pursuing two markets, operating
rooms and intensive care units, winning orders in both. But in both markets the
firm was struggling to get traction. After it decided to concentrate on
operating rooms (and made a related acquisition), it was able to gain share and
build a viable position.
Align
the entire organization. In tiny start-ups, it may be possible
to coordinate activities through daily personal interaction. In larger
ventures, project management or a bureaucracy can help somewhat with this, but
only a strategy allows a leader to empower all employees while avoiding
duplicative efforts and the pursuit of conflicting agendas. A clearly
articulated strategy can ensure that every aspect of an organization—the type
of personnel hired, the compensation system and reward metrics employed, the IT
system installed, and so on—is designed to support its distinctive value
proposition.
A clarified strategy prevented staff members at Muzzy
Lane Software, an educational gaming company, from continuing to pursue
work-for-hire that produced one-off games. This had been an important source of
funding: A single contract could cover the company’s cash burn for several
months. But the firm realized that its real focus should be on educational
publishers, and having built a core software platform on which such firms could
develop their own content, it needed to improve the suite of authoring tools.
Diverting developers to customize a game would slow down that critical
activity. The staff was actively discouraged from seeking such projects.
Make
the necessary commitments. After deciding which opportunities
to pursue, firms must make the investments needed for success. Obviously,
testing should be done to minimize risk and maximize the value of each one.
But, as discussed earlier, every so often an investment, like building a
hospital in a new district, has to be made without a guarantee of return or the
ability to be tested in phases. In those cases, it’s critical to conduct a
careful analysis before proceeding. And, of course, the investment must be a
strategic fit.
Combining
Deliberate and Emergent Strategy
If strategy is to address the entrepreneur’s challenge,
it must also embrace entrepreneurial techniques. Entrepreneurship—empowered
local experimentation—allows a firm to explore the right innovations and
continually refine them to better fit the market. It’s necessary no matter what
a firm’s size or industry is.
Here’s how to incorporate it effectively into
strategic approaches:
Vision.
The lean strategy process begins with perhaps the only aspect of the strategy
that should in any sense be permanent: the organization’s vision or ultimate
purpose—the reason for its existence. A vision should be compelling and
motivational. It may also be aspirational and possibly even unachievable.
Microsoft’s original vision, for example, was to place “a personal computer on
every desk.” Under its founders, Ben & Jerry’s strove to “make the world’s
best ice cream, to pursue progressive social change, and to provide fair
compensation to employees and shareholders alike.”
Deliberate
strategy.
To deliver on the entrepreneurial vision, a deliberate
strategy should be agreed upon by senior executives. It should be crafted with
involvement throughout the organization, from a rigorous evaluation of the
firm’s current strengths and weaknesses, internal resources and capabilities,
and external opportunities and threats. The deliberate strategy will identify
the broad market position where the firm can use its unique capabilities to
satisfy customer needs in a way that no competitor can.
In my view, the three underlying elements of a strategy
are objective, scope, and competitive advantage.
Let’s look briefly at how those
three concepts apply to new ventures.
Objective.
This is an articulation of the nearterm goal that defines success in the eye of
the venture’s leader. If her objective is to go public within three years, that
will have implications very different from those of building a sustainable
business she’ll still control five years out, or of selling to a strategic
buyer once the business is established. For each objective, the strategy must
also establish the metrics that will maximize the firm’s market value when
achieved. With an IPO, for instance, the metrics might include X million new
customers, a Y% share of online retail, version 3.0 installed at Z key customers,
and so on.
Scope.
Probably the most critical strategic guide rail, scope identifies “what
business we are in” and draws boundaries around what the venture will and will
not do. Southwest, for instance, developed its original low-cost-airline strategy
within a clearly defined domain. It decided not to compete head-to-head with the
majors in big airports or on routes with flight times over a couple of hours.
Instead, Southwest concentrated on building a dominant network of short-haul
flights between second-tier airports. And since another premise of the strategy
was that low prices had to be simple and transparent, the airline devoted no
efforts to complex yield-management initiatives that would have allowed
Southwest to wring the maximum fares from passengers.
Competitive
advantage.
Any venture needs clarity about how it will win—why
customers will buy its products rather than those of competitors. That
advantage should help the company satisfy an underlying customer need and,
ideally, address an immediate customer pain point. It can be captured in a
summary of features that are superior to those of competitors, which may also
acknowledge, if not even celebrate, those aspects of the product or service
that will underperform. This distinctive value proposition should align the
firm’s activities and shape future experiments.
One of Southwest’s key advantages, for example, was
rapid turnaround time, which helped it maximize its use of assets and keep
prices low. The airline chose not to provide meals, because doing so would have
increased costs and turnaround times. When passengers complained, customer
service personnel merely responded with polite letters explaining that adding
meal service would raise fares.
Emergent
strategy.
In implementing the strategy, managers at all levels
in the organization make myriad decisions every day. The sum of all these
independent choices gradually alters the company’s position and determines the
exact form the strategy takes over time. This is the emergent dimension of
strategy.
Many frontline decisions, like daily flight departure
times at Southwest, are routinized and require little or no thought. Some, like
whether to hold a plane at the gate to accommodate delayed connecting
passengers, require judgment and should be informed by the company’s strategy.
And some are conscious variations that seek to improve an existing product or
practice. One incremental innovation suggested by Southwest employees, Business
Select, gave passengers a free drink and early boarding for a small premium.
Because it would not interfere with fast gate turns, the airline introduced it.
It is here that the notion of strategy as a filter
looms large. In considering what experiments to undertake, people throughout an
organization develop and test hypotheses about how to improve the strategic
positioning by identifying current mismatches, gaps, or opportunities in the
offering’s fit with the market. Thus entrepreneurial activity in the lower
levels of the organization is not random. For instance, rather than developing
complex yield-management software algorithms, as other airlines did,
Southwest’s IT group focused on innovations in customer self-service that could
be delivered on low-cost, personal-computer-based systems. Similarly, frontline
personnel came up with Southwest’s boarding procedures (the unique numbered
stands for boarding at a Southwest gate), which contributed to the carrier’s
rapid turnaround time.
Once an innovation is introduced, the strategic screen
again comes into play. The venture now has to evaluate the outcome of the
experiment and decide whether to end, continue, or amend it (a decision that
will have lasting repercussions). Without a broader orientation, wrong
conclusions can be drawn from results. During the Battle of Britain, for
instance, after-action reports built a picture of where damage had been
inflicted by the Nazis on Spitfires returning to base. This was used to
identify the areas on the planes that needed to be reinforced—that is, until a
bright spark pointed out that they were not the areas that were most
vulnerable. In all likelihood, the areas where there was no damage on returning
planes were most problematic, since hits there meant planes never came back.
Strategy provides a framework for interpreting market
feedback. It is only with a clear strategic perspective that organizations
effectively learn from experiments. If the outcome of the innovation is simply
a no-go decision, all the information and skills that were developed through it
will be lost. But if the firm carefully digs down into where things went right
or wrong—which hypotheses were validated or disproved—it can amend the strategy
wisely. Instagram’s original strategy was to develop a private mobile phone
app, Burbn, that “enabled friends to check in to locations, make plans (future
check-ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much
more.” When users reacted negatively to an app that could do all those things,
the baby was not thrown out with the bathwater. Instead, the founders decided
to focus on being really good at one thing. Noticing that users posted a lot of
pictures, they spent eight weeks developing a better photo-sharing app and
doing a beta test. The rest, as they say, is history.
In response to environmental changes and the findings
of experiments, the venture builds new internal capabilities and, if necessary,
revises the original deliberate strategy. Then the process begins all over
again. It is therefore true that the firm evolves as a result of the incremental
choices made every day. However, this does not imply that the strategy emerges
only after the fact. Rather, at every point in time there has to be clear
agreement on the constraints imposed by the current strategy, even if that
strategy does shift.
Nuventive, an ed-tech company, had a suite of products
for assessing and improving institutional and student performance. But with
limited revenue, it had to choose to invest in a focused way. As it turned out,
the company’s focus would change over the years as market opportunities waxed
and waned, and the relative attractiveness of product lines shifted.
Nevertheless, at each point in time, the strategy made clear to everyone in the
firm which products had priority and which innovative ideas would have first
dibs on scarce resources (the software developers). The other products were
just provided enough support to keep them viable. Nuventive was, therefore,
flexible enough to adjust to the changing marketplace but strategic enough to
deliver against the best opportunity.
STRATEGY
MATTERS even more to entrepreneurs than to established
businesses. Yet lean methods for innovation also have a lot of value. The two
are not in conflict; rather their reconciliation in the lean strategy process
holds out hope for entrepreneurs in organizations of all sizes to become agile,
effective innovators.
Any resource-constrained organization needs a strategy
that defines boundaries. Clarifying what is in and what is out of bounds
ensures that experimentation is not rampant and is encouraged within those parameters.
It helps firms identify the longterm attractiveness of possible business models
or market spaces before testing their feasibility. By combining strategy and
experimentation in such a fashion, all firms can greatly increase the odds of
achieving lasting success.
Idea
in Brief
THE ISSUE Leaders of start-ups often see strategy, the
pursuit of a clearly defined path that is systematically identified in advance,
as the enemy of entrepreneurship, which requires ventures to be opportunistic
and quickly shift course as they learn what customers want.
THE REALITY Entrepreneurs badly need strategies that
articulate what their ventures will and will not do. Such boundaries are
crucial for making the most of scarce resources, deciding which ideas to pursue,
and evaluating experiments. But a rigid, fixed strategy is dangerous.
THE SOLUTION The
lean strategy process integrates the bottom-up approach of the lean start-up
with the top-down orientation of strategic management. In an iterative fashion,
the venture builds new capabilities and revises the original strategy in
response to what it learns.
BY DAVID COLLIS
HBR MARCH 2016
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