Last week, I attended the launch party for my friend Ben Casnocha‘s new book, which he’s written with LinkedIn co-founder and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. Mike Bloomberg hosted at his incredible townhouse on the Upper East Side, and guests included Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, Dr. Oz, Gretchen Rubin, Ramit Sethi, and a gaggle of start-up guys like Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma and GroupMe founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht.
I have known Ben since he was a teenage start-up founder (he was 12 when he founded his first start-up, and the company he started at age 14, which offers CRM solutions for public sector agencies, is still going gangbusters while he writes books, speaks all over the world, and starts other companies). So I was intrigued when he told me about The Start-Up of You, in which he and Hoffman distill their hard-won lessons from the start-up world to show how even large, multi-national organizations can adopt a start-up mindset and tactics – like taking proactive risks – to drive profits and growth. (There’s more to it than that, but this is the part I find most compelling right now.)
Key to this is the idea of “permanent beta”. As Ben and Reid say in this Q&A with Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman:
Technology companies sometimes keep the “beta” label on software for a time after the official launch to stress that the product is not finished, so much as ready for the next batch of improvements. For entrepreneurs, finished is an F-word. Great companies are always evolving. Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. You will need to adapt and evolve forever–that’s permanent beta.
Can any company or brand declare itself “done”? Not if it wants to thrive. I see every day, especially through Weber Shandwick’s community management work on behalf of more than 100 major brands, how customer feedback helps great companies get closer to customers, and to iterate and adapt to what the market really wants.
Large or small, tech-related or not, any organization can benefit from adopting a start-up mindset, smart networking, and agile processes that allow for opportunities to become realities. Frankly, it’s one of the things that compelled me to make the jump from the start-up world to Weber Shandwick. Becoming “The Start-Up of Us,” even when your team has thousands of employees and offices around the world, is a bold move. For the ones brave enough to take such an approach, I’m sure Ben and Reid would love to have your case studies! (Connect with them here.)