The Startup Way

The Startup Way — summary

The phone call that exposed a $200 million blind spot

In 2012, Eric Ries got a phone call from General Electric. They were not asking for advice on a tiny pilot project. They were asking him to help them build engines. The kind of engines that power oil platforms and locomotives. The kind that take five years and several hundred million dollars to bring to market.

Ries flew to GE's leadership academy in Crotonville and walked into a conference room full of senior executives. On the wall hung the plan for a new turbine engine called the Series X. Five-year roadmap. Multiple market segments. Eight-figure budget. Every milestone color-coded in green. The team had done what good engineers do when given a hard problem: they had over-engineered an answer to it. Then Ries asked one simple question. He pointed at the bar chart and said, "Raise your hand if you believe this forecast." Every executive raised a hand. He pointed at one specific year on the chart and asked them to raise their hand if they believed that specific number. Nobody moved.

That single moment is the heart of the book. We have built a global economy on plans that nobody actually believes, and we keep funding them anyway. Eric Ries wrote The Startup Way to fix that. His 2011 book The Lean Startup taught founders how to test ideas with real customers before betting the farm. This sequel is about something far harder. It is about taking the same scientific habits and bolting them onto enormous, slow, profitable companies that already exist. Companies like GE. Like Toyota. Like the United States federal government. Companies that everybody assumes are too big to think like a startup, and that Ries believes will not survive the next decade if they do not learn how.