Venture Acceleration

It must not come at the expense of creative or critical thinking.

The real aim of “fail fast, fail often,” is not to fail, but to be iterative. But when leaders do not fully understand or appreciate a concept, the results can have the opposite effect. Dan Pontefract shares his experience that when executives institute a “fail fast, fail often” mantra, it may come at the expense of creative or critical thinking, being reasoned as a pre-cursor to success instead of judicious, thoughtful decisions.

Thought-provoking lessons to avoid common mistakes.

Lessons learned through the startup journey, from the eyes of a person making mistakes for the first time. Eugene Cheng shares the key mind shifts he acquired growing a business to 10 employees. Focusing on the why and not the how, these items will help you change each approach to get the most out of your efforts.

Subscriptions businesses use performance metrics to measure growth. Find out more about five essential subscription metrics and how to improve these KPIs.

Subscription businesses use metrics to measure progress toward growth goals. These metrics help you answer questions like “Are our numbers where they should be? Are we headed in the right direction?”. The challenge here is that there are many, many metrics out there. It can be tempting to track each of these metrics to discover helpful information, especially if your company is just starting out. Lea LeBlanc shares that it is best to track a small number that focuses on your business's revenue growth and ability to retain customers.

Agile and DevOps work together to accelerate value delivery. Learn the business outcomes they can achieve when working in tandem.

All organizations have specific business outcomes that they target to achieve to deliver value to their customers. Andy Cleff in this text notes that implementing both DevOps and Agile transformations enhances scalability and mitigates risks for organizations. DevOps boots innovation while Agile transformation helps create a flawless organization that engages people, technology, and processes. Thus, the combination is key to successful business objectives.

How SAFe (a Trojan Horse that is successfully supplanting Agile) dilutes Scrum and Agile through ‘Agile Terminology Hacking’.

Scaling is about alignment. Focus on balancing alignment and autonomy and scaling will evolve organically.

The original article that coined the term "unicorn", attempting to find trends and patterns in startups valued over $1 billion.

Steve Blank, the father of Lean Innovation explains how companies and government agencies can innovate at the speed of a startup.

Steve Blank, the father of Lean Innovation, explains how companies and government agencies can innovate at the speed of a startup. He adds that innovation development requires a physical activities/place (like hackathons), a methodology (such as lean), pedology (such as lean launchPad/I-Corps), metrics, and funding. He explains that an organization that executes AND innovates is what he calls an "Ambidextrous Organization". Ambidextrous Organizations achieve breakthrough innovations while relentlessly improving the way they execute current business models and service existing customers. Lean Innovation has become a core concept to understand our current business environment.

Advice on how to stay cognitively open so that you don't kill new ideas too early.