Leif Baradoy

I work at a multinational company. Their success and growth has created a number of pains. I’m essentially working on a startup project in the context of a large corporation—something Eric Ries discusses in The Lean Startup, so I’m applying his methodology to my work with very positive results.

I enjoy the challenges of the product and project that I’m running. More, I respect the audacity of the VP who is sponsoring and funding the effort because we have created a solution to a major problem even though we’ve open the pandora’s box of new, arguably lesser, problems.

Big organizations can suffer Stockholm Syndrom for their own practices and processes. I see this all too often in people who defend the broken status quo, or significantly elongated project cycles, only because every possibility for change brings with it unknown pains and complications.

The question we’ve answered is whether the ongoing pain of not changing outweighs the risks associated with the effort, focus, time, and money it takes to try a novel solution. We choose the former (choose life). I like being on a Screw it, let’s do it project.

Like so many large organizations, the tension between corporate, top-down efforts and the bottom-up projects of motivated teams can create conflicts. Teams that build novel solutions to alleviate their own pain in the present become frustrated as the slower moving corporate folk plan comprehensive rollouts that render the team’s efforts short-term. Worse, the corporate rollout is often a shadow version of the superior and pre-existing solution that the small team came up with. This situation causes a breeding ground for cynicism, of course, because many on-the-ground people in organizations of this size simply stop trying to resourcefully solve their problems for fear of wasting time and money.

I’m pleased to say that my first experience working for a massive company is more Lean Startup than Dilbert.

We have found that the startup approach of a rapid build-measure-learn cycle, which is driven by voice-of-customer-feedback, means that we’re spending little money while still rapidly proving out the product hypothesis. This doesn’t guarantee longevity for the solution we’re building but it does mean we are helping to powerfully shape the future solutions that corporate will roll out.

It is very possible that the decision makers at the highest level will decided to scale the model we’ve piloted because we’ve been validating our product from the beginning.

My point: startup is sexy right now, but there are opportunities to gain many of the same experiences within the context of larger organizations. The grass isn’t greener on the smaller side of the fence and neither road is easy. Easy is the cynical road of doing the minimum and being average—not a great career plan given the state of the global economy. The opportunities to revolutionize existing global companies (and have an amazing, lucrative, and exciting career) are many and it is going to start from the ground up.