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A Refresher on Discovery-Driven Planning

Harvard Business Review

You’re working on a new venture and you know you’ve got to create a plan to execute it. That process might work for conventional or ongoing business lines, but new ventures, which are less predictable, require a different set of planning and control tools. Where Did Discovery-Driven Planning Originate? Linear plans.

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Why GE’s Jeff Immelt Lost His Job: Disruption and Activist Investors

Harvard Business Review

In his Harvard Business Review article summing up his tenure, Immelt recalls that the two things that influenced him most were Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal article “ Why Software Is Eating the World ” and Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup. Increase operating margins to 18% (by cutting expenses).

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Become a Company That Questions Everything

Harvard Business Review

To encourage company-wide questioning, The Lean Startup ’s Eric Ries says, “It’s not about slogans or putting up posters on the wall — it’s about the systems and the incentives you create to promote the behavior.” Ries points out that at most companies, “the resources flow to the person with the most confident, best plan.

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Start-Ups Need a Minimum Viable Brand

Harvard Business Review

Other start-ups develop a core technology that has myriad possible uses and they’re not quite sure which will be most appealing, so they plan to just put it out on the market and let customers decide. Approaches like these overlook the importance of brand strategy as the foundation for a successful launch.

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Big Bets vs. Little Bets and the future of HP

Harvard Business Review

HP had grown so large, to about $30 billion in sales, that Barnholt and other senior managers felt pinched to reach their double-digit growth goals. To borrow a phrase from Silicon Valley thought leader and author Eric Ries , they "achieved a failure." They executed on their plans well. Their ideas made sense.

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In Big Companies, Lean Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle

Harvard Business Review

In 2010, one of us was sitting in a room at the Harvard Business School with Eric Ries and a number of budding entrepreneurs. They were pitching their ideas and plans to Eric and their peers; once the pitch was complete, the group would then brainstorm. He had developed an extensive plan, and had the promise of grant money behind him.

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Is Bias Fixable?

Harvard Business Review

But the opposite can be true, too: for instance, Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries designed the 2013 Lean Startup Conference with the intention of inclusion. Today, I want to suggest that dreams are simply goals without an action plan. The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington is upon us, where Martin Luther King Jr.

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