I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unconscious biases that can affect hiring processes and the importance of creating equitable practices.
In this quote, Eric Ries reflects on the experience of implementing a blind recruitment process, where the personal details of candidates are hidden. This change revealed to him that, despite his belief in his impartiality, he had been unconsciously biased in his selections based on resumes alone, illustrating the significant impact of perceived factors like name, gender, and ethnicity in hiring practices. It serves as a reminder of the hidden biases that can skew decisions and the necessity of intentional modifications to create fairness and diversity.
In practice
A company presentation about improving hiring practices.
There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.
Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
I finally learned to accept that I can't make radio play blues any more than I could get Reagan out of the White House.
Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.
One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority.
To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn't make any difference to who you truly are.
We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy.
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