Jurgen Appelo - Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean and Agile Business Growth

42 Tools to Accelerate
Lean & Agile Business Growth

Jurgen Appelo

Cover design: Juan M. Franco

Copyright 2019 by Jurgen Appelo. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 9781119526858 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781119526889 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119526797 (ePub)

This book is dedicated to Amnon.
It is a joy and privilege to be your friend. Next to you, I look almost normal.

I have a cunning plan.

My plan involves unifying the methods and tools that are successfully used by startups and scaleups with the principles and practices popularized by Lean and Agile communities. It includes upgrading the global Management 3.0 brand that I launched 10 years ago from just leadership practices to all areas of running a business. My plan is also about revolutionizing the way that people learn how to improve themselves and transform their organizations. At many points during the execution of this plan, I foresee travels, discussions, coffees, and lengthy rants on my social media accounts.

Then I hear the signal of our washing machine and I snap back to reality.

I was daydreaming again. What on Earth was I thinking? I cannot even get my startup team to stick to a plan. How am I going to get the rest of the world to pay attention to what I think is important? Im not a coach or consultant. Helping other businesses to transform the way they work is not my job, nor my field of expertise. Im just sharing my experiences while running my startups. I would be a terrible adviser. As I always say, I find my own problems much more interesting than those of other companies. And I have many!

It makes me feel like an imposter sometimes. The only thing Im an expert at is learning tons of things that might help me solve my problems, and then sharing my insights publicly along the way. Fortunately, people seem to appreciate that. So I suppose theres no need to feel too embarrassed when I get things wrong occasionally. As long as I shout it loud and clear, I learned something new! The audience is welcome to learn along with me.

Its a Sunday today. Its the best day for some reflection, except when the washing machine keeps beeping. What a horrible thing.

This book is nearly finished. Im glad I decided to write it. I learned so much this past year from all the research that I performed and all the interviews that I did all over Europe. Im convinced that my business is better off now because of the many things I picked up that we could implement right away. I might even suggest that all startup founders write their own books. I would read them for sure.

Its quite a busy Sunday, actually. Apart from finishing and reflecting on the book, I have more work to do for the launch of our teams next crowdfunding round, which, quite miraculously, starts the day after I have sent the manuscript of this book to the publisher. It also seems that quite a few people are waiting to hear about my new Shiftup workshop program, for which I will use the ideas that I had while writing this book. Maybe I can do some thinking on that tonight, after a bike ride in the forest.

Oh, forget it. There is no cunning plan.

Im just winging it, like most other founders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and business leaders. I try a thousand things, and a dozen of them seem to work. Thats how Im more successful than some other people because they often try nothing. If theres one thing that I learned over the past 20 years, its to fail often and fail small. Thats how founders and leaders do many things, of which a few will be a great success. This book is just one of many things.

Now for heavens sake, which product designer thought it was a great idea to let a washing machine keep beeping?

Many of us are visionaries. As entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, founders, leaders, and creatives, we envision things that do not yet exist. We want those things to become real.

For example:

Wouldnt it be great if there were no bad jobs, no bad managers, and no bad companies? Wouldnt it be awesome if everything we knew about doing better work was somehow stored in data and algorithms in such a way that machines helped us to improve our organizations? Wouldnt it be great if, someday in the not-so-far future, rather than us telling computers how to do mindless work, they helped us do