Yiting Chen's Blog

The article Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything  states an innovative way for businesses which just start up to make an efficient plan. It breaks the traditional idea of spending weeks on building a perfect plan before the business starts functioning. It’s main purpose is to avoid making products that really meets customers’ desire. Before the actual production start, business builds a model and asks for potential customers’ opinions. Then it assemble some samples, ask for people’s opinion again, and modify its products by people’s feedback.

Compare to the traditional planning method, lean start-up is more realistic, instead of make up targets and forecasts, it encourages businesses to gather customers’ feedbacks, keep improving the products ,and adapt their original ideas to customers demand.

However, Lean Start-Up methodology only provides a very broad idea about the business itself, it doesn’t involve any specific statistics about the future profit trends and cost forecasts. It will probably be hard for the business to attract investors, as the main reason why investors invest is to get money. If they cannot get information about the company’s future financial performance, they may not be interested in this investment.

In conclusion, Lean Start-Up provide businesses an opportunity to build a plan with lower failure rate. But businesses still need to do extra evaluation for future profits and costs.

This article is mainly about the social responsibility a business has to take. For a business to operate successfully, it should not only care about profit, but also needs to promote what the society desires. For example, as a profit maximizing business, it may seek to increase the products’ price, however, as a part of the society, it’s job is to help prevent inflation. It’s a very common problem that companies might be facing. In order to gain more profit and invest more into the business, companies may only think about their own benefits like using cheaper but not environmental-friendly materials. But is that actually benefiting the company? When potential customers know that your products are not environmental-friendly and you have still set a high price for it, they are probably not going to buy it, as they might think your company is not being responsible for your business activities. Therefore your company will have a bad brand image and reputation. Although you seems to have saved money and made more profit in the short term, but in the long run, less people will going to buy your products, the sales will fall, and the company will make less profit.