The short video below tells the story of an organisation and team, in this case, in the technology sector, that burned through 40 million dollars of capital in five years and failed on a titanic scale.
If you are starting your community cafe, developing a small manufacturing adjunct to your charity, or setting up a retail outlet to support the funding of a project, then these numbers and the scale of the doomed process can be dizzying.
What does the speaker tell you that can be relevant to your social and enterprise outcomes?
Surprisingly, the entrepreneur in this case, Eric Ries, offers viewers three important lessons learned from the spectacular failure of his business.
How to embrace reality, how not to assume you automatically know what your customers or clients want and to be flexible enough to change the plan when you need to.
All lessons that even the smallest social business enterprise team can benefit from…and he’s still upbeat and engaging after his experiences too.
(Source: Original video Achieving Grandiose Failure – Stanford University Entrepreneurship programme)