Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact

by Michel Gelobter Narrated by Matt Morena

Overview

The Lean Startup concept has revolutionized the way businesses are developed. Now Michel Gelobter applies this powerful concept to the social sector.

In business, the lean start-up movement is turning the traditional approach to innovation on its head. Rather than developing an elaborate plan, raising money to fund it, and then following it to its uncertain conclusion-a process that can take years-entrepreneurs in companies new and old are launching small inexpensive initiatives to test ideas, quickly learning from failures and successes, and using that data to further refine the ideas and test them again. Social entrepreneur Michel Gelobter says there's no reason the social sector can't do the same.

Gelobter goes through the lean startup process step by step, showing exactly how nonprofits and advocacy organizations can adapt it to increase their impact. He uses dozens of real-world examples: a homelessness group that discovered the one metric they needed to improve to get more people off the streets; a technology-based literacy startup that was able to reach two million children in two years, when it took a more traditionally-oriented program fifteen; and many others. From the glimmer of an idea to make the world a better place to deep reform in the heart of the world's largest government and non-profit bureaucracies, Michel Gelobter shows how the lean start-up can drive a revolution in policy and social change.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A major step forward for the social sector.”
—Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup 

“Whether you’re developing a new campaign or trying to innovate within a large organization, this book delivers the goods for how to make change at an unprecedented scale.”
—Mike Brune Executive Director, Sierra Club

“Gelobter shows how to bring the cutting edge of Silicon Valley to some of the wicked problems facing the social sector. A must-read for all funders and change makers.”
—Barry Gold, Program Director, Walton Family Foundation

“Social change requires not just good ideas but also effective ways to implement them. In this excellent book Michel Gelobter lays out his revolutionary and practical methodology. An immensely valuable contribution.”
—Adam Kahane, Director, Reos Partners, and author of Power and Love

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191042626
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	11/02/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Foreword

For over two decades, I worked in startups creating new products. When I retired and had to reflect on how new ventures were built, I realized that there was a more efficient way to use startup money, resources, and time. I developed a process called Customer Development and helped found a movement that embodied its core practices—The Lean Startup. This approach to innovation, along with business model design and agile development, are today transforming business as we have known it.

With this book, Lean Startups for Social Change, Michel Gelobter brings this powerful toolkit to the social sector.

The social sector has to keep up with, and in some cases outpace, changes in private markets to protect the noncommercial values and assets that form the bedrock of all we care about.

This book covers the core practices of the Lean Startup—how experimentation should supplant detailed planning, the critical practice of listening to customers (or “targets” in social-sector speak), and agility—while showing how nonprofit and government organizations can embrace these processes.

Innovation is vital to both the social sector and business, but the two do not operate, and therefore do not innovate, in the 2 Lean Startups for Social Change same way. Michel provides in-depth stories, examples, and tools to bridge these methods of innovation, relying on his years of experience in each of the relevant sectors—business, government, and nonprofit—to do so.

Michel and I met through our shared interest in the environment. He moved from social entrepreneurship to software entrepreneurship in the mid-2000s and contacted me to help with his first company. I went in the other direction. After I retired I started serving on nonprofit boards as chairman of Audubon California and then as a public official on the California Coastal Commission.

While I've helped accelerate innovation over the last three decades, I share with Michel a desire to repair the world we live in and to pass on to future generations a place with the same opportunities and beauty.

We must all learn to innovate, to change, to preserve what we most care about. With this book, Michel has made an invaluable contribution to that task.

Steve Blank
Pescadero, California

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