If you buy into the ideas of The Lean Startup – specifically that of the “minimum viable product” (MVP) – you’ll appreciate that the biggest shift Ries has made to our thinking is in regards to scale. It may have once been true that if you wanted to launch a new product or service, you wither did or you didn’t. Binary. Your idea either came in the world fully formed, or you never explored it in the first place.
Those days are gone. I signed up for a CRM system the other day for $15/month. It can scale with me as I add other team members onto the system, or shrink back down if I decide that they don’t need to be on it after all. Effectively, I can test it. I can create a proportional response to the size of the opportunity/issue.
In Making it All Work, David Allen used the karate expression “mind like water” to mean the appropriate level of response to any particular input. (Water creates waves in perfect response to a stone breaking its surface – no more no less)
I would suggest that with the myriad of tools already in existence, combined with the fact that we can build almost anything we need to, we can start building “business like water” as well – responding with the appropriate level of resources allocated to a particular problem at any time. No more “yes/no” binary. Almost everything scales. Are you taking advantage of that?
