Steve Blank

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

Building an Advisory Board In my travels outside the building I kept my eyes out for articulate and visionary scientists and engineers who had expertise we lacked, and were willing to help in an advisory capacity. I chose to hire engineers from within each of our target markets and set up “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.”

Engineer 198
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Lean Innovation Management – Making Corporate Innovation Work

Steve Blank

—– Lean Innovation Management. Each horizon requires different focus, different management, different tools and different goals. To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Here’s how.

Lean 120
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Why good people leave large tech companies

Steve Blank

The CFO asked me to stay as one of the engineering directors came in for a meeting. The director had complained to his boss, the VP of Engineering, who admitted his hands were tied, as this was a “facilities matter,” and the VP of facilities reported to the CFO. The company is still one of the hottest places to work in tech.

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How to Keep Your Job As Your Company Grows

Steve Blank

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. And herein lies the tale….

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Massacre at IBM

Steve Blank

How dare you,” the fab manager said. “We The supplier’s CEO directed his business unit general managers to take a SyncDev workshop. consisted of product manager, hardware-engineering manager, software-engineering manager, applications analyst, and software designer. That night we flew to Boise.

San Jose 256
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Why the Future of Tesla May Depend on Knowing What Happened to Billy Durant

Steve Blank

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Each of these GM divisions focused on its own day-to-day operations with each division general manager responsible for the division’s profit and loss. There’s the Alfred P.

Michigan 268
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Tesla Lost $700 Million Last Year, So Why Is Tesla’s Valuation $60 Billion?

Steve Blank

They were both transportation, and they looked vaguely similar, with the only apparent difference that one was moved by horses attached to the front while the other had an unreliable and very noisy internal combustion engine. Companies with business models built around internal combustion engines disrupted those built around horses.

Valuation 266