Be more innovative! Stop wasting people’s time! Be more successful!
These are the things you would have heard if you went back to the old ‘Lean’ approach used in manufacturing days. However, the focus was more on process improvements and less on innovation. The ‘Lean Startup’ approach emerged with the need to launch startups successfully. But I think this methodology is equally applicable to large companies, SMBs and startups. It is even applicable to personal projects.
Earlier, large companies would take their own time to build a product before taking it to the market. They had to first find their way through all the internal bureaucracy before they could launch a product, but since most of them had the luxury of either monopoly or dominance they could afford to be slow. Now a product or service needs to be taken to the market ASAP, otherwise it won’t be relevant any more.
This approach is applicable everywhere. Most costly failures could be avoided if LS was used religiously. But people and organizations follow old patterns out of habit and hence the failures continue. Like design thinking, the lean startup approach should be practiced at both the personal and business levels to make them habits. That is when we will really start to see the benefits.