After your book becomes a New York Times bestseller, and you travel the world helping founders developing new apps, entrepreneurs at hypergrowth pre-IPO tech startups and managers at the largest, slowest, most heavily-regulated and bureaucratic organizations in the world, what’s next?
For Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup,” it’s a sequel. It’s also a Kickstarter campaign offering his new book “The Leader’s Guide,” a 250-page, hardcover and digital book offered exclusively through Kickstarter, notes a recent article on Tech.Co. The campaign, Ries says, is an experiment designed to see how he can collaborate with Kickstarter users for his next book (working title: “The Startup Way”). Through an agreement with Ries’ publisher, Crown, “The Leader’s Guide” can’t be sold in bookstores; it will only be offered to Kickstarter backers and only for the length of this campaign.
Ries states,
I want my new book to be researched, written and published in a way that is consistent with the methodology I believe in—and Kickstarter provides a platform for an even deeper level of collaboration with my readers. This will be an entirely new kind of publishing process for me, and one that I hope delivers a great deal of learning about how to publish a book successfully in the 21st Century.
In other words, as Tech.Co writes, Ries’ campaign is essentially “an experiment designed to create collaboration with readers in order to write the next book.”
According to the Kickstarter campaign,
The Leader’s Guide is aimed at entrepreneurs, executives, or anyone leading a project or team. It will be full of stories about how companies both large and small are adopting Lean Startup methods to scale successfully and operate in conditions of extreme uncertainty.
It will cover questions such as,
How can I convince my team that testing our early ideas with customers does not mean they should sacrifice quality or forget about our vision?
How can I convince senior leadership that innovation projects require a different system of accounting?
How can I do Lean Startup-style experimentation in a highly-regulated industry?
How can I incentivize and reward my team for working in a cross-functional way?
How can we turn functional specialists in areas like IT, HR and finance into allies when it comes to supporting new ideas?
The campaign, which just launched today, is off to a sound-the-trumpets start, with 1,457 backers pledging $103,421 of the campaign’s $135,000 goal, and 29 days to go. Rewards are organized into four tiers, ranging from $5 to receive backer updates and content, to deluxe packages that include a unique chance to go inside legendary venture capital firm , with accommodations donated by Airbnb, and more.
In addition to authoring “The Lean Startup,” Ries serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has consulted to new and established companies as well as venture capital firms, according to his Kickstarter bio. In 2010, he was named entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and is currently an IDEO Fellow. Previously he co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup.
Added bonus? Domestic shipping for the hardcover book and more is included.
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