Three Actionable Components of Success
From entrepreneurs building their first start-ups to well-established organizations with years of experience, success has always been the driving factor – whether it is in the form of high profit or good reputation. However, underlying these achievements, we rarely take the time to consider our definition of “success”.
So my question to you is “How do you define success?”. Do you define success as a list of outcomes? Or have you ever considered an alternative definition of success?
Success can be viewed as a journey with three components.
1. Ask Questions: Building the vision for success
As stated by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, change is the only constant in life. As a result of rapidly changing market conditions, it is becoming more difficult to stay up-to-date with the latest changes and make decisions based on the latest available information. Fixed and repeatable processes prevent an organization from responding to these changes.
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, highlights the fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves in order to succeed:
- Which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision?
- What do customers really want? (This is neither what they say they want nor what we think they want.)
- Are we on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business?
2. Adopt the Right Mindset: Small rapid failure is good for success
If we want to answer these fundamental questions, we need to formulate hypotheses about which Possible Success Factors (PSFs) would contribute to long-term success and validate or invalidate these hypotheses through rapid experiments.
What happens when your experiment results in failure?
Using the example above, let’s say you created an additional free service that yielded zero increase in the number of subscriptions. Yes, this is a failure, but the takeaway is that you invalidated this hypothesis. Opposed to spending more time and money on creating additional free services, you can allocate your resources to hypotheses that were validated (i.e. Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that have been verified in having an impact on the achievement of your goal.)
3. Act on Progress: Learning is not an excuse to explain why you failed
However, learning does not serve as an excuse for a failure of execution. Validated learning is not intended to cover up why you had failed to achieve the promised results. Instead, it demonstrates progress empirically – truths that enable you to refine and improve on the strategy that is driving the business’ success.
If success involves learning through failures, then consider all the learnings you have gained from last year. Share your learnings and upcoming challenges, so that we can address them with you. https://goo.gl/w5gaah.
Source: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
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