if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed — at seeing what happens — but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is… - Eric Ries

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Startup, I have always been a bit of a troublemaker at the companies at which I have worked, pushing for rapid iteration, data-driven decision making, and early customer involvement.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don’t care how the product is assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential part of the definition of a startup.

Although lean production techniques are powerful, they are only a manifestation of a high-functioning organization that is committed to achieving maximum performance by employing the right measures of progress over the long term. Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop. But without this foundation, efforts to encourage learning, creativity, and innovation will fall flat — as many disillusioned directors of HR can attest.