Podcast Transcript and Show Notes

Pete Abilla: Eric, first off, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. I just wanted to give you some context before we begin. I’ve been in the lean world for awhile. I started at Toyota and I’ve worked at Amazon and eBay. And I’ve done consulting for other companies and industries. And I have to tell you, man, in my years I haven’t seen so much excitement about lean as I do about the lean startup movement. There’s lot of excitement around it. Even old timers like Art Smalley, Matt May, Michael Balle, Emiliani; they are all speaking really positively about it.

Eric: Thank you.

Pete Abilla: So nice work on that.

Eric: Thank you; and thank you for asking them about on the record. It’s been great. A lot of those guys I don’t know at all. I didn’t know what they thought of it, so it’s been really cool for me just to see all of that happening.

Pete Abilla: Yes, it’s been really neat to see their responses. They are very excited about it, and you know, in the words of Matt May, he said that the lean startup what he sees is really this true spirit of lean, where it’s not focused on tools…

Eric: Yes.

Pete Abilla: …but really on the principles, and they can be applied anywhere really, and so it’s been really cool.

Eric: Yes, it was very meaningful for me to hear that. That’s so much what we strive for in our lean startup movement and to hear that recognized by one of the old guard was really a treat, so thank you for making that happen.

Pete Abilla: You bet, awesome. Well let me jump to my questions. I want to begin by talking about FAST Works. There’s a lot of buzz around it, and I think it’s actually really, really cool. So GE has partnered with you to help them build FAST Works.

Eric: Yes.

Pete Abilla: So let me read a quote and get your reaction to it.

Eric: Okay.

Pete Abilla: This is from Mark Little, Head of GE Global Research. He said, “We’re looking at young Eric thinking how the hell is this software dude going to have anything to say to us, and yet his ideas were transformational. I went in completely skeptical about it, and I came away completely enthused.” So you pitched to the old guard; these guys are super seasoned. You pitched to GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt. Were you freaking out?

Eric: Totally, yes, I was very nervous. And I didn’t know what this was going to become. My background isn’t software, as Mark said; it isn’t Silicon Valley. You know, I had written in my book that entrepreneurship is a kind of management, and that lean startup was a way to manage in the situations of high uncertainty that every kind of company faces, and I made this kind of relatively grandiose claim that it could be used by companies of any size, scale, industry sector, like all business authors do.

But I didn’t know whether people in those situations would actually take me seriously or not. You know, it was the deduction, it was a hypothesis that I was very confident in, but it’s one thing to be confident of it, you know, when you’re sitting down to write something. It’s quite another thing for people who are full-time practitioners whose job depends on delivering results to take it seriously.

And yes, the first time I presented to Jeff Immelt; I just told the story, it must have been to Business Week. They just did a profile about it. They were asking me the same question, was I nervous? And I said, the way you know I was nervous is I wore a suit, which in Silicon Valley you never do. But I’m being summoned to the legendary facility at GE at Crotonville.

The meeting was with Jeff and his, pretty much his top 200 managers in the world, so the most senior people in the entire company. And you know, I consulted with my wife and decided to wear a suit. Of course I show up in a suit. I’m not making this up. Jeff Immelt is making fun of me. My first interaction with him, and I was dressed more formally than he was. He wasn’t dressed nearly as formally as I was. And you know, he was teasing me, “What did you wear a suit for?” And what I got was that they’re expecting hoodie and jeans, you know, and something a little bit more flippant. So I don’t know if they took it as a sign of respect or what, but yes, I was quite nervous.

Pete Abilla: That’s awesome. Well I come from the world where you can’t dress too formally, so I think that’s awesome. Well how is Fastworks going now?

Eric: I think it’s been incredibly successful. I think certainly far beyond my expectations. And a lot of the most successful stories about it, you know, I feel like it’s not really my place to tell. As with all my clients, I want to respect their confidentiality, and that’s what gives them the safety to kind of have really candid conversations with me, so I try to follow their lead in what they say publicly.

But you know, if you look at the videos, like from the Lean Startup Conference last year, we had some people from GE there to present. (?) said that there has been a piece in Business Week, so there has been some public acknowledgement of the fact that this has had a tremendously positive impact on the company and to the point that Jeff Immelt said he wants this to be the new operating system going forward for how they do work, you know.

Pete Abilla: Wow!

Eric: For a company that has had so much experience with lean and obviously the very famous