Good thing is, we know what stops large companies from acting like startups.
The more important to me is, why large companies want to be like startups? From my personal experience, because startups can quickly evaluate if something works or not from market perspective. Meaning, customers like it (pays for it) or not (nobody cares). Large companies love this concept but they often can’t hug it.
The goal of this post is to share with you few simple reasons, why big companies can’t act like startups:
- Timesheet lock. Let’s say you have a great logistic manager (with 10+ experience in your company). She has brilliant product idea (only idea) and she thinks customers would like it. She joins internal incubator to work on the idea and test it with customers. Then, her boss complains she spend too much time on the idea instead of taking care about daily duties. I call it a timesheet lock. Her timesheet should reflect daily duties, not some crazy idea she came up with.
- Core business lock. We sell drugs. We are best in it. Our investors love our business model. So why you guys (investor talks to a company CEO) don’t focus but keep distracting. Please focus on what you are great at. Be there. Stop distraction.
- InBox lock. We are the best in moving goods to convenience stores. We are best at it. We hired the best guys, they know everything about the industry. They build advantages their competitors can’t. We are in the game. We are best in it. We are InBox.
- Workshop lock. Let’s have a workshop. Let’s generate ideas. Let’s do design workshop. Let’s design the best think. Let’s motivate people to be creative. By the way we forgot about testing ideas with customers. We workshop excellence centre.
Please have a 3 minutes coffee time, to think about which lock exists in your company. Try to break the lock.
Arek Skuza – coFounder of K2 Digital Ventures which helps large companies design and scale innovative ventures with audacity and speed of startups.