A few weeks ago, way back before Thanksgiving, I had the chance to meet Eric Ries, founder of IMVU and author of Startup Lessons Learned.

Eric has some good insights about startups, but I think it all comes back to two basic principles that are broadly applicable:

1) Be careful how you measure progress. You manage what you measure.  If you measure the wrong things, you’ll manage poorly.  Additionally, Eric brought up a good point, “Don’t assume advancing the plan is equivalent to progress.  What if the plan is flawed?” Particularly in startups, but in any context, you need to be adaptive.

2) If a mistake is made, spend an amount of time, proportional to the magnitude of the mistake, implementing systems for preventing that class of mistakes. Don’t make the same mistake twice.  Prevent that class of mistakes by incrementally developing prevention systems.

-Kevin
12.2.09