Reinventing Startups: A Startup Study Group
Reinventing Startups: A Startup Study Group
In the summer of 2009 I moved to New York City to attend graduate school at Columbia University’s Teachers College to study Social-Organizational Psychology. Over the subsequent 2 years I took classes, concentrated on conflict resolution, and supplemented my classes with a ton of books on topics related to Social and Organizational Psyche that I thought were missing from my course of study. Maybe I’ll add a list of those books at the end of this post (mostly for my own recollection).
After grad school I failed to secure a related job in big consulting or big corporate HR like a lot of my fellow classmates did. I worked in restaurants and sort of stumbled around for a year until I was talking with a newly-minted VC friend of mine I met while in grad school. I told him I think startups could use a lot of the wisdom from the books I read and courses I took in grad school. I figured then that the earlier one intervened in the development of the org the better and healthier and wiser the org could become. He said he agreed so I started blogging, got a desk in a makeshift co-working space, and started searching for clients who might be early stage startups seeking consults in applying social psychology, organizational psychology, conflict resolution and the like to their day to day.
But I found no clients. Especially no paying clients. I was terrible at sales. I didn’t setup a formal offering clarifying what you’d get in or why you’d want a consult. I suffered from super low confidence. “I’ve never worked in a start up,” I thought to myself all the time. “Aside from camps and restaurants I haven’t had a jobby job in my life,” I often confided in friends. What did I really have to offer?
To this day I still think about early stage, not investment, but org-psyche application. Years later, when I read a book titled Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux a former McKinsey consultant (a real consultant unlike myself), I was re-inspired to do this work. So much so, during the pandemic, having read and re-read Laloux’s book several times, I purchased the domain reinventingstartups.com. While I still haven’t done anything with this domain, a colleague of mine who I worked with in a chaotic startup years ago recently asked me about a conflict he was having with the Founder/CEO of a startup he’s currently working in.
I shared a bit about the time I was in his shoes and my reflections on it many years later and he seemed to think it helped. Years after buying reinventingstartups.com I was back thinking about what would live at such a domain name. All that comes to mind is a study group reading a handful of books. Books I viscerally have the urge to read with my colleague as I think he’s startup curious, or more specifically, founder curious, and I think these books would provide a much much wiser backdrop for him starting a startup.
Last week I jotted down the list of books we’d read in this daydream of a study group. First up is, wait for it, Reinventing Organizations! Haha. Why? Laloux has a section in one of the last chapters I think about often describing what he thinks one must do before founding a new organization inspired by the research he shares in his book. I also think it’s valuable to see the wide spectrum of organization types because it allows one to extrapolate other possible types and also provides a sort of menu for you to select the organization type you’d like to bring into the world.
Second up is, The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Why? In the book, Goldratt is applying his Theory of Constraints to a manufacturing plant, but it applies to so many other contexts and I think getting really familiar with this pattern and the related solution set as well as his notion of a process of ongoing improvement from the start of a new organization would be very very clutch.
Third up, and last for now is, The Lean Startup. While I only read this one once long ago, early in my time at the startup where I met this colleague, the book applies Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints to starting a new organization. I find that applying the ideas in The Goal is a major challenge. I’ve run into this as I try to apply them to the software development teams around me where I work. I simply don’t know how to help to optimize the flow of products and features through these teams using the theory of constraints. If Eric Ries hadn’t written The Lean Startup, doing this thinking for me, I probably wouldn’t be able to apply the theory to starting a startup either.
In the end, my little consultancy failed. I couldn’t support myself. But publishing my thoughts in writing on the topics I was offering consulting services about lead to new opportunities working with a former classmate in Dubai and then after that in startups for years and years afterwards. Now I work in a sort of teenaged, public “startup,” so I’ve seen many of the org-psyche patterns at several stages and sizes of organization and I still think much of who you are and what you think and what you say and do before and early on in the life of an organization matters immensely throughout the subsequent life of any organization you start. Taking the time to reflect deeply on these questions could mean life or death for your budding organization.
