Spinning Into Control: Improvising the Sustainable Startup

ISBN-13: 9781137513557 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 166 str.

Amiel Kornel

Opis

Starting a new venture requires specialized survival skills that are more craft than science. Each employs the exquisitely difficult-to-master but potentially generative and stabilizing art of improvisation.This book encourages startup founders to maintain control of their destiny by obsessively perfecting their startup's story and key relationships as much as its initial product or service. It highlights the importance of improvisation in the incubation of startups. Startup founders can maintain control of their destinies by developing the skills of venture craftsmen, learning to behave more like explorers and artisans than managers. Tinkering, wandering, listening, and conversing, they will overcome the limitations of scientifically-based " lean" methodologies. These improvisational arts provide wobbly, nascent ventures with stability and conserve momentum during early-stage incubation. Like the gimbals of a gyroscope, they counter the entropy born of conflict and confusion that is continuously pushing young enterprises towards chaos. These startups become fault tolerant. Vignettes in each chapter describe hardscrabble stories of entrepreneurs, craftsmen, and venturers -- some recent, others historical -- recounting the challenges they faced, their responses, and the outcomes. Those who read this book will learn the timeless skills that entrepreneurs need to incubate new ventures.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Ode to the venture craftsman

Chapter 2 Mastering the art of tinkering

Chapter 3 Mastering the art of conversation

Chapter 4 Mastering the art of wandering

Chapter 5 The improvisational startup

Chapter 6 Making do

Chapter 7 Making new

Chapter 8 Blending art and science

Chapter 9 Epilogue- The failsafe entrepreneur

O autorze

Since co-creating and incubating on-line publisher IDG News Service in pre-Internet 1985, Amiel Kornel has co-founded, managed, funded, and/or advised nearly 20 early-stage startups. He has also advised more than 15 multinational companies in the US and Europe seeking to launch new ventures, pilot startup accelerators, or redesign their innovation practices. Through his work as venture capitalist since 2004, he has qualified roughly 1000 startups as potential investments. A sailor, he divides his time between homes in San Francisco, California, and La Rochelle, France.

Blurb

Could everything we’ve learned about entrepreneurship simply be wrong?

There is no shortage of how-to books with ‘manual’ in the title, and articles promising ‘The 7 [or 6 or 10] key traits of successful entrepreneurs’, which breed an infectious optimism all too often quashed as startups fail. Amiel Kornel puts a persuasive case for an alternative theory that while grounded in the natural way great entrepreneurs operate resists reduction to a simple recipe or method.

Kornel, who has coached hundreds of entrepreneurs, believes that disciplined planning, lean management, and commitment are no guarantee of success. The limited resources of a startup demand knowing when and how to explore and ‘tinker’, artfully recombining ideas, designs, media, software, and materials on hand. True venture craftsmen harness and redirect the energy of startups that might otherwise spin dangerously out of control towards failure.

The stories of entrepreneurs like Sun Basket’s Adam Zbar, Minecraft’s Markus Persson, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Metacode Technologies’ Joel Schatz are woven throughout the book, along with examples from beyond business, including legendary ocean-racing sailor Isabelle Autissier and acclaimed urban designer Gerard Penot. Kornel shows how meeting challenges in a broad variety of fields rife with uncertainty often relies on the ability to loosen the coupling between command and control, a prerequisite of skillful improvisation.