Tom Peters Quotes

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

One of the reasons microcomputers progressed so fast is people are willing to accept crashes. It's faster to build something and try it, even if it means you'll have to rebuild later... If you spent too much time building and massaging one vehicle, you don't learn anything.

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.

As soon as you know what you're doing, you're doing it wrong.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Entrepreneurs don't write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they're always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

When you feel you have good although incomplete expertise, start trying things. If it's not working, try something else; maintain an experimental mindset.

When you are young, you might be in the wrong position, but you know you are fast, and so you can compensate with your speed.

Failure can teach you something, and as long as you're moving very, very quickly, you're going to start piling up the wins. Speed gives you the luxury to be able to fail.

Science is so incremental and so full of setbacks and small steps forward. In order to really thrive in this business, you have to be able to glean as much joy from the failure days and from the small increments as you do from the breakthroughs.

You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.