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You can use this page to email Tom Gilb about Startup: Social Values Success.
About the Book
- Book Intended Readership: Founders and early planners in ‘social’ startups: defined as primarily for social good, rather than ‘economic wealth’ for the funders. [Coutts]. Probable social startup funders are governments, private individuals, idealist entrepreneurs, foundations, and philanthropies, rather than Venture Capitalists. Meaning, they are instances motivated by social good, and willing to invest in it. Even at possible high rates of failure.
- Book Purpose: to teach and enlighten startup planners, in these specific well-tried planning methods, which enable them to develop and focus on achieving, a set of socially useful stakeholder values, while also ‘considering the economic factors sufficiently-well’, to succeed in delivering social values ‘efficiently’. In short: Taxpayer/Philanthropist ‘Values for Money’.
- Survival and Wasted Effort. The ‘3-year survival rate state-of-the-art’ is about 83% [Coutts, 2024]. This is comparatively good, and we know these methods, here, are a pre-requisite for attaining that level of success. But, a ’20% failure rate’ is still an unacceptable waste, of resources, and of potential value delivery. So we hope to improve the survival rate, at 3 years, towards 99%. Meaning, we will try to avoid most any waste of resources, for any startup. At the extreme ‘not wasting resources’ is more important than one startup’s survival. We believe this is possible by disciplined application of efficient prioritized value delivery, and by pivoting violently from unsuccessful paths. This means turning potentially-failed startups into successful ones at earlier stages. It also implies teaching and cultivating sound, holistic, long term, planning, decision-making, culture, which will enable much longer-term ‘efficient’ and ‘value productive’ survival.
- To make this clearer, we will kill off failure increments quickly, so that the startup organization can quickly pivot to successful application of its capital, labour, and knowledge - to a social purpose. Either another adjusted social purpose, or with another means, to achieve the initial social purpose. This is the real definition of a startup: seeking a successful value delivery existence in the longer term. Not a specific product or market, just to make money.
- From another point of view, long term viability is a primary objective, and scaling is an interesting secondary objective, but not a necessity (as it is in conventional startup-thinking). Scaling can also effectively be achieved by small-scale replication, rather than by growth. Imagine 5 million mini-independent ‘Facebooks’, rather than one Mega?
About the Author
Tom Gilb has been consulting on management problems, for top management since 1962. As a result he has developed and refined his own powerful methods for management planning. He has worked for many of these years with his son Kai Gilb.
These methods are jointly called ‘Planguage’ – a Planning Language. They are unique in helping managers to think quantitatively about the qualitative aspects of their decisions. For example how to quantify ‘engineering productivity’, or general product quality?
Most of the consultancy work is done at the CTO level. Most of it is for technical multinationals, and some financial groups. Most of the work is for planning organizational improvement in productivity and quality (for 10,000 engineers for example). The rest is about big projects (like 1,000 engineers, $100 million).
Tom does not profile himself as a management consultant. In fact he works at the grass roots of advanced engineering, systems, software, aircraft, IT, telecoms, electronics.
This often leads to meeting top managers who appreciate his methods, and become clients. There is a well-documented successful spread of his methods at HP, IBM (CMM 4) and Intel (20,000 engineers trained there in his methods). Other interesting famous method-user organizations are Boeing, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Philips, Ericsson, Nokia, Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Equinor and many others, smaller and less famous.
In June 2024 Nicholas Coutts at GilbFest #25 told us of over 220 startup projects with 3 year success rate of 83% using Toms Planguage (Competitive Engineering) ideas, as a clear causal contributor. See "Some examples of technology for good”
https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26703.09126 This made me prouder than all the big corporations we helped! I worked with him directly on some of these startups.
Tom has been invited to lecture at dozens of universities worldwide (including Berkeley, Stanford, London School of Economics, Imperial College).
He has previously published nine paper books. The 2005 book is ‘Competitive Engineering’.
He has spent 2 years (2014-2015) working on his new book ‘Value Planning’, especially for top managers. Published initially on LeanPub 2016.
In 2018-2024 He produced about 35+ books digitally.About 5 annually. Most at Leanpub, or Gilb.com or https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tom-Gilb (with quite a few papers, slides, experiments, older book chapters etc.). It is his way of leaving good technical ideas behind, for when professionals grow to need and appreciate them even better!
In 2020, long course-length videos were made by Oslo Software Architecture (OSWA), based on the SEA Systems Enterprise Architecture book https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb508f8y_d0PqRZKPCVVVxQ,
And many long videos about the books were made by BCS SPA SG such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaBhijqVWYA for the Sustainability Planning book.
and
BCS made: Value Requirements video 22 April 2020, 3 hours
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrwQtG6IMw&list=PLKBhokJ0qd3_wlvr0j85YhmNfNj8ZJ8M-
and many other of my book videos are below this one on that site.
In 2012 he was made Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.
More information, and many publications, at gilb.com. A 'Tom Gilb' search will tell about things not mentioned here.
He lives in Norway, near Oslo, in Summer Fjordside at the cabin, and is both Norwegian (as of December 2015) and US Citizen (1940).
In 2024, he is 83. He is 'commercially retired', avoids travel, but quite active in spreading his ideas, mentoring disciples, learning what is going on.
Not very impressed with the level of methods for IT/Agile gang. They are nowhere near seriously doing software and systems engineering. Far too many top managers and professors who still cannot quantify critical values and qualities. Responsibility and motivation for serious success and quality seems totally lacking. Sad, the 'war against ourselves'.