Filled with case studies of entrepreneurs struggling to innovate their way to success, and fortified with the author's tutorial commentary on each successful or failed turn, The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries should be required reading for all residents of the business world.

Early in this How-To for entrepreaurs, Ries focuses on squarely on process over outcomes. With his Lean Startup Method, Ries stipulates that startups exist -- even more fundamentally than to produce goods or generate profits -- in order " to learn how to build a sustainable business." 

In its focus on process, The Learn Startup Method is underpinned by 3 critical ideas:

• Validated Learning. As a startup learns its way to success, it must identify its main operating assumptions and then run "frequent experiments to allow entrepreneaurs to test each element of their vision." 
  
• Build-Measure-Learn.  Cycling through this feedback loop is the core activity in The Lean Startup Method. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measure customer reaction, then learn whether to press onward or go back to the drawing board.
• Innovation Accounting. This is essentially Ries teaching an approach to the "learn" portion of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback cycle.  Ries argues that for an entreprenuer to be successful, she must avoid being blinded by what he calls "vanity metrics," and focus instead on how to identify and measure true progress. 

The Lean Startup made a powerful impression on the ClearGears team; as a result of reading it, we've changed the way we approach our work.  Going forward, we've vowed to create hypotheses around each proposed new ClearGears feature, and to perform A/B testing in order to objectively measure what represents progress and what does not. We've built a culture of learning at ClearGears, we've embraced a process-oriented approach to our work, and we now rely on Innovation Accounting to drive our product development. These are just a few of our many take-aways from reading this wonderful book. 

You can buy this book here, and follow Eric Ries’s great blog here.