2,645 karma · joined September 6, 2008
Healthcare is a recurring topic in the book, for the reasons you specify. In fact, I call for the adoption of a Director's Oath similar to the Hippocratic Oath for boards. They can do just as much - or even more - harm.
Your skepticism is well earned, and all I can really say is that I hope you'll read the book and judge for yourself. I tried really hard to lay out the evidence for two things that are necessary to address this skepticism:
1. We have to see that these structures are changeable. The economy that our grandparents inhabited is almost unrecognizably different than the one we inhabit today. So too, we can imagine that the economy that our grandchildren will work in may be unrecognizably different to us. Why does that necessarily have to be in a negative direction? What was once changed by human hands can be changed again.
2. I know this is hard to believe, but there's actually a lot of evidence that mission-driven, purpose-driven, trustworthy organizations outperform their conventional counterparts. The fact that this is so gives us a lot of tools we can use to drive the change we want to see.
On top of all that, we are living through a massive generational shift. The new generations have lived their whole lives under this maligned structure, and they are sick and tired of it. If you think they are going to sit quietly by and allow those structures to persist, I think that is very unlikely. Which means we're going to have change one way or the other; the only question is how violent and difficult is that revolution going to be? We'd be much better served to change proactively because we know what the right thing is.
And it's interesting that people see Lean Startup as short-term; that's really not what's in the book. I tried really hard to make clear that you need a foundation of long-term thinking in order to make any kind of rapid iteration system, whether that's Lean Startup or Lean manufacturing, work. By the way, this is an old finding that shows up in a lot of the management literature going back to the people who originally studied the Toyota Production System.
But all that said, I'm really glad that you feel LTSE embodies a long-term optimistic view of the future. That was absolutely my goal in starting it.
I wanted to have a wide variety of stories in the book from many different industries to show just how pervasive these forces are that we're doing battle against. While there are some things that are unique to the tech industry, I think we have more in common than what sets us apart.
FWIW, I wish people would talk about the "startup movement" rather than the "tech industry" for what we do. But maybe that ship has sailed.
And if you really want to live in a world where people should be listened to on the basis of how rich they are, well, you don't really need to change anything, now do you?
I don't think there's any way to talk about this without running into the problem of anthropomorphization. So I tried to be really careful with it in the book. You'll have to judge for yourself if you think I got it right.
And I'm especially sensitive to the question of accountability because you're right: today we mostly want to see these problems as being done by individual villains, because at least we can hold individuals accountable. How well is that going? It seems like we are breeding a class of people that are completely above accountability. I don't think that's tenable. I think in the long run, this system will collapse if it cannot hold the people responsible for atrocities accountable.
Personally, I think the best way to do this is to understand the systems that are causing these behaviors today so that we can locate responsibility in the right place.
If people had paid more attention to the pioneering management theorist, Mary Parker Follett, who wrote more than a century ago, we wouldn't be in this mess. But of course, her work was almost entirely erased and forgotten, only rediscovered in the 1990s.
Don't worry, I have a whole chapter about this in the new book.
or you can look at this handy infographic: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eries_incorruptible-new-york-...
The sad fact is that most VCs are not even consciously aware that they're doing this. They are simply the agents of a deeper force.
I don't think you can put an idea out into the world without understanding that some people are going to willfully misunderstand it. We live now, especially in the age where literally ignorance is optional. When you see someone who misunderstands what an MVP is, you know that they haven't spent even five minutes reading the Wikipedia page or made any effort to try to understand it. I don't consider such people to be good faith interlocutors, and therefore I don't really think the fact that they criticize or don't understand the concept is that relevant to the rest of us who are capable of thinking for ourselves.
At the end of the day, I try to lay out in my first book the reasons why the theory that gives rise to MVP and the rest of the Lean Startup makes sense, is logical, and is consistent with a set of first principles. As a result, that theory is capable of making predictions which you can test for yourself.
Writing now for other founders who might encounter this page: If you look elsewhere in this thread, you will find lots and lots and lots of entrepreneurs who are saying how much they found these concepts helpful. You shouldn't do it because other people said so. Rather, you should take that as inspiration to think for yourself, try it, and see if the theory strikes you as valid.
However, the details matter a great deal, and I don't know that much about what the actual proposal the SEC is going to adopt is going to be. The last draft that I saw left me pretty worried.
What's interesting to me is that, in all the hubbub, neither the journalists nor the policymakers seem that interested in the actual evidence that we have amassed in academia on this question. For example, one important study suggested that moving from semi-annual to quarterly reporting costs companies something like 5% of their market cap. It's incredibly expensive, not because generating the reports is expensive, but rather the evidence seems to be that companies under quarterly reporting start to run the company for the benefit of the report rather than for customers.
That this is bad for investors, I hope you will see as self-evident.