Applying the Old to the New

I came across two very useful books recently: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People  (I wish I’d read it when I was 20 or even earlier!) and Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. One is relatively old and the other one is brand new. While the Carnegie’s book was published in 1936 and Ries’ book was recently published, they are both rooted in old concepts.

How to Win Friends and Influence People has had a remarkable shelf life and remains one of the best selling ‘people management’ book of all time. What makes it effective is Carnegie’s ability to clearly articulate key communication/interaction skills, mixed with stories how people apply them in real life settings. 

The same thing can be said for Ries’ book, in which he describes how the scientific method (diagram from sciencebuddies.org) can be applied to the ‘startup’ universe, mixed with real life stories of active believers and users. He defines a startup as “an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

As we look at the basic steps of the scientific method (whose development goes back at least two millennia), it makes a sense why it would be a good tool to manage a business with so much uncertainty. It is easy to see when we replace the last step, “Report Results” with customer discovery and development – the heart of all successful businesses. The power of iteration – a key component of the scientific method – takes on additional significance as the pressure to find new buyers for any products/services has be to weighed against, quite often, limited resources.

As I reflect on our own work at iVotech, it strikes me how lucky we are to enter the ‘startup’ world at this point. There is a wealth of information and insights from which we can draw. How successful we can be might depend on a simple equation: Process + Product.

Process is something that we can control. Carnegie’s insights about how we communicate and interact with others fit this description perfectly. This process solely depends on ourselves and no one else.

Product (or outcome), on the other hand, has external influences beyond our control. But here, the good old scientific method or Ries’ Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop will go a long way toward managing the uncertainty.