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Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model
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| List Price: | $29.95 |
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Product Description
You have a new venture in mind. And you've crafted a business plan so detailed it's a work of art. Don't get too attached to it.
As John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain in Getting to Plan B, new businesses are fraught with uncertainty. To succeed, you must change the plan in real time as the inevitable challenges arise. In fact, studies show that entrepreneurs who stick slavishly to their Plan A stand a greater chance of failing-and that many successful businesses barely resemble their founders' original idea.
The authors provide a rigorous process for stress testing your Plan A and determining how to alter it so your business makes money, solves customers' needs, and endures. You'll discover strategies for:
-Identifying the leap-of-faith assumptions hidden in your plan
-Testing those assumptions and unearthing why the plan might not work
-Reconfiguring the five components of your business model-revenue model, gross margin model, operating model, working capital model, and investment model-to create a sounder Plan B.
Filled with success stories and cautionary tales, this book offers real cases illustrating the authors' unique process. Whether your idea is for a start-up or a new business unit within your organization, Getting to Plan B contains the road map you need to reach success.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #34749 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9781422126691
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
Review
From the Back Cover
“This is a fantastic book. The stories are excellent . . . deep and insightful . . . and the storytelling is real. Getting to Plan B isn’t as much about second tries as it is about the authors’ helping you understand what it takes to drive an early-stage company to success.” - Bill Campbell, Chairman, Intuit
“This great book will guide business leaders and help them stay focused as they transform their plans. Whether they are reshaping a new business model, or executing a quarterly strategy review in an ongoing business, this book will help leaders overcome the unpredictable waves and obstacles that stand in the way of their envisioned goals.” - Takaaki Hata, Partner, Globis Capital Partners, Tokyo
“Getting to Plan B is the definitive handbook about the mind-set and moves required to lead any company in our messy and ever-changing world. This is more than the most useful book I’ve ever read on entrepreneurship: Mullins and Komisar challenge and redefine how organizational strategy and innovation ought to be managed in any company. - Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author of The No Asshole Rule
“Getting to Plan B is a treasure trove of clear, practical lessons for entrepreneurs. It is real-world, hard-hitting, and prescriptive—not the fuzzy theoretical stuff found in too many business books. Komisar and Mullins repeatedly challenge conventional wisdom with experience and insight. This is a must-read.” - John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
“John and Randy perfectly capture the trials and triumphs of entrepreneurship. They weave in antidotes that can be successfully applied. I wish this book was published a decade back—I could have used it as an entrepreneur. Now as a venture capitalist I would suggest this as required reading to all my CEO’s.” - Vani Kola, Founder, Indo U.S. Ventures, Bangalore
About the Author
John Mullins is Associate Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, and a veteran of three entrepreneurial companies. Randy Komisar is a Partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and has served as a Consulting Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.
Customer Reviews
Get this book if you are starting a business (or already run one).
It takes an average of 58 new product ideas to deliver a single successful new product. That is the core message of Getting to Plan B, a new book by John Mullins and Randy Komisar.
Since Plan A almost never works, it is critical to quickly learn from failure and move on to a successful Plan B (or C or D or E...). This book provides an exceptionally helpful framework for how to do this. Its power lies in its analytical framework combined with vivid examples from companies - including both for-profit and non-profit.
Contrary to popular perception, most successful businesses did not strike it rich from the beginning. A company like eBay, profitable from day one, is the exception that proves the rule (and Pierre Omidyar has said that he realizes how lucky he was). Even eBay has struggled to figure out how to make money from new business lines such as Skype. Google would not be the behemoth it is today - and might even be out of business -- if it had not discovered its own Plan B, paid Adwords. Amazon burned through hundreds of millions of dollars before it hit upon the right business model that made it profitable. Today, the jury is out on whether Twitter and even Facebook will find profitable Plan Bs that sustain their early growth.
What matters most is not the quality of the initial business plan, but instead the ability of the team to iterate successive business plans as a means to finding what works. Merely flailing about from Plan A to B to C increases the chance you will run out of cash before finding the right Plan. So the trick is to experiment quickly but intelligently, and with discipline. That is what this book helps you do.
Anyone who is thinking about starting a new business should read this book. Given the pace of change in the world, even established business leaders should read it, since the constant threat of new competition often requires even existing companies to develop new Plan Bs.
Full disclosure: My own organization, GlobalGiving, is one of the case studies in this book. My only beef is that Mullins and Komisar did not write this book years ago, which would have saved me a lot of heartache and helped me iterate my own business plan more quickly.
Brevity is the soul of wit
Most of the book's ideas could be expressed in under 10 pages. It is long on common knowledge and short on authors' unique insight and guidance. It may be that the long-winded discussion is a deliberate attempt by the authors to train the reader on their conceptual framework, but its utility as a communication tool is questionable in the absence of wide adoption. Having said that, the issues raised and points made are clearly vital to building a business, and anyone doing so should definitely consider them.
An excellent tool to help entrepreneurs succeed by formalizing their learning process
This is an excellent book on how entrepreneurs can succeed by finding similar successful companies to emulate, by creating formal business experiments and then by monitoring and learning from them. Since entreprenuers tend to think about their business constantly, we do the above in the back of their minds and informally. Applying the tools in the book help you formalize the process and create brief but actionable plans which utilize the lessons we have learned. Once I applied the dashboard, several key insights jumped right out and I have been able to make changes to my business based on the data we had gathered over the past year.
As I started applying the dashboard to other business initiatives that we were conducting, we also added a column to the dashboard which identified the risks associated with those initiatives and the cost of the risks (in $ and time). In one case, it was a legal contract that we needed our sales reps to sign.
This book is a huge contribution to all entrepreneurs to help them succeed.
Mohammed Mansoor Ahmed
President
Fore Support Services, Inc.
