Avoiding Common Failures

Companies taking on the lean startup approach of build, measure, learn might not know a world where crippling unforeseen failures happen, but there are still plenty of organizations out there that fall victim to large failures, and funny enough they’re often the same type of failure. Here are 3 that seem to make the headlines all too often, and maybe with a little awareness the path that leads to these could be marked and avoided.

Growing too fast

This seems to be one of the big ones that plagues young companies. There is a lot of awareness around it, but not to the extent that stops it from happening. Growth potential needs to be measured beyond top-level resources. Companies need to understand the effort spent behind each sector of their operation, and they need to understand how output is affected when they are given more load to bear. Some systems will scale gracefully, and some will not. Even if your strategy is linear growth, that doesn’t mean your structure, processes and people can be scaled linearly; the environmental variables will have a larger impact on your company as you build your tower higher. And for those companies who seem to break out quickly, heed needs to be given to opportunities presented; funding is great, but make sure it’s the right amount attached to the right amount of growth expectation.

Competing with disruption

This seems to be happening more and more. It’s not that competing with disruption is bad, but all too often companies end up either bringing a bucket of water to the fire, or sending their lawyers out to whine, “no fair, you cheated!”. Companies who have established themselves in an industry can feel entitled to stay on top just because. Consumers know better, and while loyal customers are powerful adversaries, a wrong couple of moves can ruin that relationship. When disruption occurs, don’t kick and scream, embrace it, rarely is there a way back. Tweak it, find how the new can naturally fit into your organization, let your brand consume it. And invest. Invest as if you were leaping across a chasm, you have the money to do it, so do it.

Death by restructuring

How business is needed to be done is changing, but how companies do business might not follow suit. Now is a time where technology is disrupting business to a critical point of rapid change. Those underestimating this change think they can take a look at what has changed, reorganize and continue forward, but as change continues they end up structuring and restructuring and restructuring again. It’s not that they shouldn’t be doing so, keeping a single fixed structure in a time of unprecedented change could fair worse. But this tactic is like bringing a hammer to a nail gun convention. Instead, you have to change a deeper core part of your organization. Your structure needs to inherently be less rigid. People need to be brought to the forefront, where generalists who can understand and operate in multiple modes relevant to your business can thrive. There will always be a place for specialists, but encouraging a t-shaped employee model, where someone can be a master of something and understanding of a wide breadth of other things will create a flexibility that is vital to a volatile business landscape. Process also needs to be re-worked so your people are free and empowered to take on multiple and different roles, this can be done by doing away with production bottlenecks (you have to go through me) and implementing standards to make sure that while anyone can take on any work, the right level of quality is maintained.