Entrepreneur as a job title

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While listening to Eric Ries talk about entrepreneur as a job title within large organizations, I could not help but reminisce about my days at Verizon. Verizon group CIO Shaygan was way ahead of his time as he implemented most of the principles suggested by Eric in his book  - The lean startup. He incentivised the culture of entrepreneurship by making each Director of Engineering responsible for P&L (even if it was just paper money and no real transfer of money took place).

Each Director was allowed to grow his organization as big as he wants to, as long as he can pay for it. If the P&L group could not raise enough money to pay for all the employees it was forced to let go off the resources. Obviously this encouraged group leaders to hire consultants so that scaling up and down can happen without impacting  full-time employees.

Overtime this culture of innovation and competitive spirit gave its way to politics.

Audible.com

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I signed up for audible.com yesterday just to try it out. I also wanted to review the

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses book as I had no patience to read it the second time. I was pleasantly surprised by how effective audible.com is. Maybe my experience was so positive as I had already read the book. 

The only biggest issue with the audible books is you cannot purchase them within the iPhone apps. I am sure this has to do with Apple insisting that publishers pay 30% cut. I had to buy the book using a website and then download it to iPhone, which takes an effort. Remember my earlier post about reducing friction in user experience.

After wasting time politicking in my new role as a GM at a different kind of company, I am back to writing my book. I am hoping to start publishing some material from the book as blog articles. This will help me get some valuable feedback as well as generate buzz for the book.

Friction

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Today I was talking to my friend about a product idea that requires users to take a very simple action to derive value from it. She thought that the product might have an issue with stickiness if it requires users to take an explicit action on regular basis. The reason that Mint works so well is because user is not required to take any action or change his normal routine in any manner. It pulls the necessary data from the bank servers.

The discussion reminded me of something I read in an innovation strategy book about continuous vs. discontinuous innovation. Even a small friction in value delivery can reduce the adoption and stickiness of the product. Users are less likely to adopt to discontinuous innovation, unless the value they derive from the effort to learn or perform an extra action is higher than the effort.