The Lean Entrepreneur

You are not a Visionary… yet.

The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become one.

Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience and then, simply make the vision real.

Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt. With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions; and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride.

Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators and investors. It leads us to heartbreaking, costly and preventable failures in new product and venture development.

The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet.

Anyone can be visionary. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:

• Apply actionable tips, tricks and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs.
• Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones.
• Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products.
• Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce time and budget for product development.
• Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks.
• Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them.
• Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets along with bonus online videos.

• Special Thanks
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Startup Revolution
• The Myth of the Visionary (Take 1)
• The Myth of the Visionary (Take 2)
• Case Study: Disrupting Venture Capital
• Which Is to Say, Disruption Hurts
• Case Study: Customized Value Creation
• And Cue the Lean Startup
• Lean Startup, Please Meet the Lean Entrepreneur
• Chapter 2: Vision, Values, and Culture
• Vision and Values
• Case Study: Is the Problem Really Solvable?
• Lean into It: The Lean Startup Culture
• Case Study: Experience-Driven Jumpstart
• Case Study: KISSmetrics
• Case Study: Root-Cause Analysis on Sales
• Over the Horizon: A Framework
• Case Study: Lean Startup Horizons
• Chapter 3: All the Fish in the Sea
• Case Study: The Ethology of the Fish
• Know Your Audience: Why Segmentation Matters
• Market Segment
• Personas: Create a Fake Customer
• Case Study: Salim's Fish Inventory
• Choosing a Market Segment
• Case Study: Carla's Dream Jobs
• Case Study: It's in the Name
• Chapter 4: Wading in the Value Stream
• Articulating the Value Stream
• Case Study: Seeing from Customer's View
• Value-Stream Discovery
• Case Study: AppFog's High Hurdle
• Chapter 5: Diving In
• Listen to Your Customers — or Not
• Customer Interaction
• Case Study: Don't Just Get Out of the Building, Get Out of the Country
• Case Study: What's the Worst That Can Happen?
• Case Study: A Nonprofit Lean Startup
• Chapter 6: Viability Experiments
• The Infamous Landing Page
• Concierge Test
• Case Study: Curating User Experience
• Wizard of Oz Test
• Case Study: Idea to Wizard of Oz in under 90 Days
• Crowd-Funding Test
• Case Study: Two-Sided Market Lean Startup
• Prototyping
• Case Study: MVP: Motor Vehicle Prototype
• Chapter 7: Data's Double-Edged Sword
• Case Study: Disrupting the Undisruptable
• New Products
• Existing Products
• Case Study: Instrumenting Growth
• Chapter 8: The Valley of Death
• Minimum Viable Product
• Case Study: The Minimum Viable Audience
• Case Study: Social Impact Lean Startup
• Case Study: But My Marinara Is to Die For!
• Case Study: O2, Telecom at the Speed of the Internet
• Chapter 9: Real Visionaries Have Funnel Vision
• Innovate the Funnel
• Growth Waves
• Case Study: Ten Lean Startup Buzzword Questions with Rob Fan
  
• Chapter 10: The Final Word
  
• Case Study: Drinking Kool-Aid and Eating Dog Food

Not as bad as I thought… It is a bit dis-organised, but they manage to contain many business development ideas necessary for a sprawling entrepreneur. And they are not afraid on telling where the ideas are coming from, which is refreshing in these kinds of books.

I wouldn't go so far as calling a good book, but it is worth reading.