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Eric Ries – ‘pivoting’ immortalised in a New Yorker cartoon

By Agile, Disruption, StrategyOne Comment

James and I recently had the pleasure of hearing Eric Ries speak on innovation and product development, through an excellent event called Thoughtworks Live here in Melbourne.

Eric Ries has written a great book called The Lean Startup, which was an important book on our list of 33 texts you should read to get your Luna MBA. His presentation last week did a great job of pointing out how the book is as applicable to innovation within big companies and organisations, as it is the garage-based ‘startups’ – the more popular sense of the term.

One of the most enjoyable moments was Eric’s reflection that he never set out to add a word to the global lexicon of buzzwords around startups, and how the term ‘pivot’ had become painfully over-used over the last 2 years. It is still a key concept in the book, but to some extent obsession with it has distracted from the many other great ideas. Pivoting is all about the moment you have learned your startup idea really sucks, and (in James’ words) ‘you need to take your investor’s cash and try something completely different, quickly and without them panicking and taking all their money back’.

When there’s a New Yorker cartoon based on your new buzzword, you know you’ve made it.

Not just an IT thing

By Agile, Development, Lean, People, TechnologyOne Comment

Derek Sivers says we shouldn’t share our goals, or make them public, that the act of sharing our goals makes us less likely to achieve them. However, our experience with the teams we’ve worked with is that making public commitments to each other is a powerful motivating force.

With all things Luna Tractor we try to practice what we preach, plus eat our own dog food, so today we went public and launched a project to share the stories of agile and lean transformation at Lonely Planet.  At a lunchtime briefing with our friends at ThoughtWorks, we started to share some of the stories and photographs we have been collecting as the basis of an ebook about the remarkable business transformation at Lonely Planet in the last 5 years.

The book’s title, ‘Not just an IT Thing’, was inspired by Thoughtworks’ Lean business strategist David Joyce, who in early discussions with us was lamenting that so little progress has been made outside of software development with systems thinking, lean, agile and kanban methodologies, and that all too often agile was dismissed as “just an IT thing.”

To continue this, and share our progress in an agile way, our goal is to publish some of the photographs of Lonely Planet’s remarkable workplace on a regular basis as the content comes together.  Stay tuned to the blog for snippets and the team’s stories, and most importantly tell us what you think.

A note of thanks must go to everyone over the last 5 years who told us to ‘write it down!’ Well, your exhortations have been heard, and this time we’ve actually started.

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