Startup Envy

Every once in a while, someone has a great new initiative they want to push company-wide. “Startup culture” was a big thing a couple of years back. Startups were everywhere, so incumbent corporations wanted to create their own internal startups.

The problem is coming up with a way how to go about this whole affair. I’ve never worked at a startup, but I’m pretty sure they don’t happen by herding a bunch of randomly chosen individuals into a conference call and telling them that they have to come up with some value-adding, industry-disrupting idea.

Naturally, that is exactly what we did. About 200 people were yanked out from whatever their job was supposed to be into this startup conference call, and after 20 minutes of briefing, we were split up into about a dozen teams of people who had never met or even heard of each other. Time to start spitballing ideas that will disrupt the industry - a tall order, to be sure.

This initiative was planned to last a couple of months, which in hindsight seems both too long and too short. It was too long because over the span of 2 months, we just kept introducing and reintroducing ourselves to complete strangers, and it was too short because a single one hour weekly meeting with a bunch of strangers is unlikely to generate an industry-disrupting idea, especially since right after the call, everyone just went back to whatever job they were actually paid to do.

I seem to recall “gamification” being thrown around a lot on this call, but what were we gamifying?

No one knew.

Some people really wanted to take the lead in these teams, and I was more than willing to oblige. At the end of our two month stint in this weekly “any ideas?” group, we had a powerpoint presentation of something ready and we presented this disjointed mess amidst a veritable Oktoberfest of other disjointed messes.

So what was the end result of this? Shockingly, forcing hundreds of randomly picked individuals into small groups to generate ideas that will disrupt an entire industry is not particularly effective at generating ideas that will disrupt an entire industry.

I have no idea of the cost of this kind of an exercise, and while I believe that sometimes you just have to experiment, a coordinated effort of this magnitude was doomed to fail from the get-go.

Perhaps now we know how startups overtake larger, incumbent corporations. Startups begin with having a small group of people with a shared vision come together with a product idea, be it software or whatever, and then beginning to execute on only that. How do large corporations compete with this? Well, by kickstarting their own startup culture exercises. Obviously this happens by assigning random people into groups and ordering them to generate an idea that will obliterate the competition.