Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2009–2010years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Some research on business strategy, by rita mcgrath("discovery driven growth") found that many successful entrepreneurs have changed their initial idea while building their business.
This is specially true for very dynamic/chaotic business areas.
Her recommendation for dynamic/chaotic business areas:work with an adaptive strategy, using small experiments(in similar spirit to eric ries's "lean startup").
- Can you articulate why this is "completely disingenuous", why it is "link-bait" and why it is a "bit of shallow drivel" in addition to describing it as such?
The title is absolute, but the text qualifies it: "1) conventional approaches and planning don’t work when you’re trying to get into new spaces"
They also say Stop presuming you can be right in a world of massive uncertainty. I doubt you disagree with that.
I can see how you could interpret the title as implying that "planning is a waste of time"; but that's not what the text says. 37Signals have said they deliberately choose provocative positions for their titles. I can understand you not liking it, but why judge the whole by the title? Personally, I automatically qualify it with "plans are useless but planning is indispensable" (because it makes you look at the issues.)
Incidentally, the link is to a book by MacMillan and McGrath that's being launched this year (not an article): Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity. Maybe you're thinking of their 1995 paper of similar name "discovery driven planning". When I read that paper a few years ago (via "The Innovator's Dilemma") I found the details in the paper not very helpful; but the basic idea of an experimental approach was brilliant: (1) work out what you don't know, and (2) make a plan for finding out (instead of a plan for achieving something, that presumes you already know.)
Such a plan is "a plan to improve". And this gives a different interpretation to the title (quoted from Macmillan and McGrath BTW): "the only plan is to learn as you go."
Anyway, your flag has succeeded, so someone agrees with you. I'm disappointed, as it's throwing the text out with the title.
