‘The Netherlands has more lean startup consultants than startups’ says Brant Cooper

Dutch corporations are heavily investing in Lean Startup, Agile and Design Thinking and this spawns a lot of specialists in this field as a sign of the times.

Brant headlined the Dutch Lean Startup Circle meetup last September in Rotterdam. Brant praises some Dutch corporations such as ING, who are transforming their companies to work in a much more agile way — adopting structures such as the Spotify Framework. ‘I haven’t seen anything like that in the United States yet’.

Companies who rely only on outside consultants to transform their business will fail, Brant Cooper says. Real change can only succeed if people inside the company adopt things like Lean Startup with rigor.

Company culture comes out of the structure and the way the set up their working processes. Startups typically don’t work in a very methodical way at all. ‘Startups really hate process, while corporate people love to follow a process’. Founders typically behave in a lean way, but are not typically using the tools designed for it, such as the Business Model Canvas.

Startup founders are naturally very good at experimentation. Yuri van Geest tapped into the discussion as well: ‘Be mindful about the process, so you don’t become it’, warning that the process is only a means to an end.

To back up these statements I handpicked some visual notes of the last Leancamp in Rotterdam.

The sketch reflects some of the challenges large companies face adopting the startups’ way of working. One of those challenges is to keep outside stakeholders informed and invested into the process. Lots of people and departments in large companies are risk-averse and aim to keep the execution of current business humming. Brant calls these the ‘innovation anti-bodies’. One way to get those people on board is not to call it Lean Startup, but to own the process and label it in a language everybody in the company is familiar with.

You can listen back to the entire discussion here — including some other fireside chats with ING and Philips on the topic:

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