Some 500 people packed the theatre on a recent Monday evening at the Business Leaders Network (BLN) event showcasing Eric Ries, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup. (Well done BLN, and especially Mark Littlewood, who hosted the proceedings and ran the Q&A with aplomb and humour.)

This and numerous other packed TLS events in the preceding week in Ireland and the UK showed that Ries’s fame preceded him, even drawing attendees from continential Europe.

Much has already been written and said online about the Lean Startup method, and the book is so widely available that I don’t think I need to give a thorough synopsis here. Ries also has the occasional detractor who says that the method is not novel, not really ‘scientific’ as claimed, not workable beyond digital industries, and that it risks creating teams who will iterate to infinity and never figure out what to build.

Working among academics (without quite being one), I regularly come across people who are compelled to weigh in with criticism, and my colleagues half-joke that if they don’t do this systematically they are not establishing their legitimacy. Let me instead peer around my inevitable envy at someone who can draw such a large crowd and say what I like about Lean Startup, while also considering some of the objections.

Ries’s personable manner and candour in describing his own successful and failed start-up experiences along with the key points of his method make it easy to like him, even if they ironically seem to inculcate some of that ‘great man’ worship from listeners that his approach intends to reject.

The assertion that TLS is not entirely new is true, and probably would not be wholly rejected by Ries himself, who on Monday openly cited various management, research  and development methods which can be used within a lean startup venture.

Ries starts very simply by rejecting an outdated, so-called ‘great man’ theory of entrepreneurship (‘it’s always about men,’ he also points out for the benefit of the 35% female audience).

This concept frames entrepreneurial success as an outcome of specific (i.e. charismatic, super-human, exclusive) personal qualities of an entrepreneur.

Although the media tirelessly persist in propagating a ‘hero’ view of business success, scholars who study entrepreneurship – particularly those who study technology and innovation-based venturing – have for a good three decades increasingly focussed on the processes, strategies and resources used by entrepreneurs, factors which are replicable and not strictly dependent on personality.

Of course, as these scholars know from their own body of literature, being a ‘first mover’ with an idea or discovery does not always lead to ‘capturing the market’. Ries’s book captures people’s imagination and is accessible in a practical way for its consumers. This cannot often be said of even the most profound and groundbreaking academic research (unless you develop a particular and patient approach to reading it). So Ries deserves plaudits for asserting to a wide audience, in a fresh and readable way and with clear empathy for his readers, that entrepreneurship is not epic movie material but really a form of management. He also offers up an actionable method for market-centred product development. TLS contains practical tools, described articulately and with vivid case examples.

What I most appreciate about TLS is that it frames a pro-active and non-threatening approach to the problem of early failure.

We constantly hear it said that Silicon Valley’s success is partly due to a culture which tolerates failure, unlike Europe’s culture which stigmatises it. Much lip service is paid to the opportunity and value of learning from failure, yet I have seen little written or cited to explain just how some entrepreneurs transform early failure into later success, nor much consideration about how the amount of time and effort spent failing could be used to one’s advantage. On the other hand, I have seen studies showing that not all entrepreneurs learn from failure. Let’s be honest, failure may be a learning opportunity, but it hurts.

Grief, disappointment and the dashing of hopes (not to mention the decimation of one’s finances) are not emotionally conducive to lucid learning, even if failed founders in SV may wear their failures like medals for valour in war.

That’s why I like the fact that Ries approaches failure head-on. The anecdote from Ries’s talk which most stuck with me was the one in which he described toiling to build and release a web product, then not being able to analyse any user metrics because no one even clicked past the landing page. Since we know that most entrepreneurs fail, Ries proposes that instead of fearing or trying to avoid failure by striving to make a product with all the bells and whistles, you embrace early failure as a given and make use of it: ‘fail often, fail fast’. He effectively counsels entrepreneurs to take some control of failure by parcelling it into discreet chunks (minimal, fast and utterly imperfect product iterations) which allow you to check just one or two of your business assumptions at a time on customers (face to face and online), gain basic insights from each try, then translate your discoveries quickly into your next iteration. This way, you mitigate uncertainty, fail in small, tolerable ways before you’ve put all your chips down, put your insights to good use (‘pivot or persevere’) and measure any subsequent impact on your results. Actually, this is basically the stuff of good prototyping and market-testing practice  (early prototyping should not be expensive, perfect or overly time-consuming) but is seldom exercised effectively by eager novice start-up founders, who typically think product success depends on flawless techical execution.

Ries says he began to use this and other practices described in the book when starting his present venture, IMVU, having endured previous failures. I find his taking the care to coherently frame and share his experiments and outcomes with everyone to be a generous act (yes, even if he is making money at it). I have met many people in this sector willing to give ‘feedback’ or ‘mentoring’ to individual entrepreneurs on specific issues, but not many willing to set down their global view of venturing for all to see, use and even judge. Another such person is Stanford’s and Berkeley’s Steve Blank, one of Ries’s mentors and investors, and another in my personal sphere is Bart Clarysse, my co-author in The Smart Entrepreneur and a professor at Imperial College, whose own experience and research here in Europe have led him to counsel some similar approaches to early start-up validation and development.

Only time, with lots of people trying the method, will tell us whether TLS is ‘scientific’ or universal. Nothing is foolproof in start-up venturing because uncertainty and change are part of the game.

As with any technique, there is always a risk of it becoming an orthodoxy, but the contention that TLS teams could start iterating ad nauseam without selling products probably depends more on people’s basic attitudes to risk than on the method itself, as a recent post by Steve Blank points out. Most entrepreneurs tend toward glib over-confidence rather than excessive caution, so anything that encourages them to back up their assumptions in the real world is a good idea.

And speaking of real worlds, the world of new venture finance is retrenching and forcing a leaner approach to starting up. Investors won’t fund proof-of-concept and market testing activities. ‘Can’t you get an R&D grant?’ is an oft-repeated refrain, balanced by the rather shrewder ‘you might get an early customer to fund you through this phase’. So TLS also offers start-ups a roadmap for bootstrapping their way to finding a scalable, investable business model.

This article was written by Sabrina Kiefer, a Venture Coach in the Entrepreneurship Hub at Imperial College Business School in London and co-author, with Prof. Bart Clarysse, of The Smart Entrepreneur.

Image of Eric Ries courtesy of technotheory.