PIC No. 22:
• Title: The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed
• Author: Linda K. Yates
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (Oct. 25, 2022, 336 pages)
• Management Bucket #18 of 20: The Systems Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 22 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
“Silicon Valley is coming and they all want to eat our lunch.”
Imagine a splashy infomercial promising that your Fortune 500 company can launch a new program, product, or service—in just 12 weeks! (“But wait! There’s more!”)
Believable? Hardly. We know how earnestly those corporate and department cultures protect their turfs. We know about Silo Syndrome. Twelve weeks? No way. And by the way, everyone is “quiet quitting.”
Yet…The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed, by Linda K. Yates, is very compelling. Here’s the promise:
“…you can without a doubt incubate growth. With a team of employees and just three months of dedicated work, that team can create a new business initiative—including a robust operating and execution plan to run it—as innovative and customer driven as anything seen in Silicon Valley.”
I was skeptical. I usually give a book until page 25 to discern if there are sufficient reasons to read further. Oh, my. By page 21, I was already convinced! With a thoughtful and polished 12-week plan, this could happen. And as the author warns, it must happen.
Why? Jamie Dimon, chair of JP Morgan Chase, admits that “what is keeping him up at night is the fear that ‘Silicon Valley is coming and they all want to eat our lunch.’”
So what’s “the unicorn within?” Yates quotes this definition from Fortune magazine: “A Unicorn is a privately-held startup valued at $1 billion or more.” The big idea: when you identify and unleash the entrepreneurs and passionate founders inside your company, you can then “build a pipeline and portfolio of ventures to generate meaningful growth” using a four-step process:
1. Ideate
2. Incubate
3. Accelerate
4. Scale
The third step, Accelerate, includes “a series of pilots and small bets to reduce risk, find ultimate product-market fit, and generate revenue (scalable businesses).”
Yates promises, “It’s not that hard—it’s also not fairy dust.” She has a corporate and entrepreneurial track record—and note this: while she’s the sole author of this book, she uses “we” throughout to appropriately recognize the contributions of the team members at their company, Mach49.
The book is written for large corporations and seeks to inspire them to address the “complex problems the world faces—poverty, disease, climate change, water, racism, and education.” Noting that dysfunctional governments cannot solve these problems, the author also doesn’t have high hopes that NGOs can make much of a dent either. However, I strongly recommend that nonprofit leaders and board members read The Unicorn Within. So much is applicable for both for-profit and nonprofit ventures.
Example: do you understand the “pain point” of your customer? (“Is there real pain? What is the pain? Is there a lot of it?”) And…depending on those answers, don’t skip the page that begins, “THE TEAM NEEDS TO KILL THE VENTURE NOW.” Oh, my!
But…if it’s still a go, you’ll appreciate the sections on:
• Storyboard Interviews (“Set the context. Introduce a tension. Resolve the tension. Show a positive result.”)
• The magic moment in any Incubate phase. (Hint: it’s not Pitch Day!)
• The one-page 12-week plan—with key tasks on the left-hand column and 12 weeks across the top of the page.
• How to Build a Venture Factory (fun!)
Oh…and don’t skip “Designing the Business: How Do We Make Money?” Pretty important, because Yates includes these ominous motivational stats:
• Ninety percent of new startups fail
• Seventy-five percent of venture-backed startups fail
• Under 50 percent of businesses make it to their fifth year
• Only 40 percent of startups actually turn a profit
And this wake-up call: “…research demonstrates that once you have a product that looks anywhere near complete, your interviewees feel sorry for you and won’t tell you the truth. They might tell you what they like or don’t like but are frankly too polite to admit that they didn’t want the product in the first place, so as good as it looks, they’ll never buy it."
Kudos to the author and Harvard Business Review Press for publishing this amazing resource. Jammed with in-the-trenches wisdom, the compelling graphics, charts, and layout invite you in—and you just can’t leave.
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the Systems Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies.
• Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, by Peter Sims (read John's review)
• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t – Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0, by Verne Harnish (read John's review)
• Corporate Entrepreneurship: How to Create a Thriving Entrepreneurial Spirit Throughout Your Company, by Robert D. Hisrich and Claudine Kearney (read John's review)
• Entrepreneurship, by Robert D. Hisrich, Michael P. Peters and Dean A. Shepherd (read John's 2010 review here and see the 2019 international student edition here)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed, by Linda K. Yates. For more book reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting. (And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.)
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