Ben Kaufman: 7 Tips For Rapid Iteration

A principle at the heart of unplanning is iteration: the value of constantly testing and adapting business ideas to see what sticks. So I liked Ben Kaufman's post at the 99% website '7 Tips For Rapid Iteration'; Ben explains his career has been all about rapid iteration – generating lots of ideas and then quickly testing them to find the ones worth pursuing. Ben is the founder of Quirky, a social product development company that launches a brand new consumer product each week. He argues that success is about having lots and lots of good ideas:

"The trick is killing good ideas quickly and swiftly in an effort to focus on great ones. This requires being a ruthless prioritizer and relentless critic. You need to be able to sift quickly through a long list of ideas both good and bad, slicing and dicing until you end up with a great, effective, and elegant solution".

Fred Wilson: Trying Stuff Out

Unplanning your business is about having the guts to try things out, to make decisions, to be spontaneous. And that means you’re going to make mistakes. That’s part of a ‘just do it’ mindset, part of prototyping your ideas. And once you realise you’ve cocked up, you need to quit, and move on.

Fred Wilson is a Venture Capitalist in New York who blogs at AVC.com (cool domain). It’s great to hear Fred’s VC take on entrepreneurship and I love this post about the importance of being action oriented:

 “People ask me all the time about the traits I look for in entrepreneurs and action orientation is at the top of the list. I'd much rather back someone who makes 100 decisions a day and gets 51 of them right than someone who makes one decision a day and gets it right”.

 I’ve seen so many management cultures get stuck in the analysis of an idea, before it’s even launched. Whereas, it’s much more effective to just go for it – try something out, then stand back and measure how you did. Fred Wilson is a fan of the ‘trying stuff out’.

“You can think and debate about stuff all day long or you can try stuff out and see what works. From my experience, the latter approach is a much better one”.

* I love this seat made out of a pallet. I took the photo above on holiday in Crete last year. I doubt the guy that made it spent hours looking over drawings or design concepts; I like to think s/he just tried it out.

Sejal Parekh: Insight, Instinct and Prototyping

Sejal Parekh was until recently Head of PR And Communications at ?What If! Innovation. She’s now co-founded her own start-up Trifle Creative with a promise to make organisations’ workspaces more effective. Trifle is also creating a London space where clients can come to get inspired, stimulated and motivated. She has lots of experience of working with big organisations and now with her own business has insight into what’s important planning a start-up.  Sejal thinks that instead of traditional business planning, start-ups should be led by insight, use their instinct, be brave enough to stick to their guns and use rapid prototyping to test their ideas in the market.

Michael Schrage: Entrepreneurs Need Traditional Business Planning As Much As Fish Need Bicycles

I must confess I wasn’t familiar with Michael Schrage until Tom Peters told me about him. So I looked him up. A co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative, Michael Schrage writes, consults and collaborates in the design and development of digital innovation. He’s a research fellow with the Sloan School of Management's Center for Digital Business and a visiting fellow at Imperial College's 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship' programme. He's done consulting and advisory work for Microsoft, Procter&Gamble, British Telecom, BP, Siemens, Embraer, Google, iRise, Mars, the Office of Net Assessment and other organizations. Editorially, Schrage has been a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Wired, Red Herring, Forbes, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

When Tom Peters called Michael the ‘guru’ of prototyping, it was clear I needed to track him down. And this is what he has to contribute to the #Unplan debate:

“ To repurpose a ‘60s cliché, entrepreneurs need traditional business planning as much as fish need bicycles.... Even with generously flexible definitions of 'traditional,' I’d argue that investments in 'planning' are less valuable and/or useful and/or useable than investments in adaptiveness, responsiveness and agility....

When entrepreneurs come to me for 'free' advice, I generally ask them to discuss with me their three or five most cherished, most important and most essential 'assumptions' they have around their proposed business - this makes clear to me what level of rigor and comprehensiveness they've brought to their thinking. Then I ask them what prototypes, models and experiments they've explored to test and challenge those assumptions...because actions always speak louder than words...deeds are always more persuasive than thoughts.

To me, 'planning' is not about how we project into the future, it's how we stress test and retest the assumptions we build upon to innovate and advance”.

picture credit: HSM Global