What Large Corporations Can Learn from Startups
By: Khan Tanjeel Ahmed
Tags: Corporations, Startup, Learning, Collaboration, Failure

1. Keeping Things Simple

In startups, there’s a scarcity of human resources always. So, they needed to find a way to make things done with that limited resource. So, what did they do? they kept things simple.

They have reinvented collaboration based teamwork. Here, no one is designated for anything specific(though they have designations in their business cards), rather everyone is designated for everything. There’s small email loops, fewer departments and small hierarchy structure to keep things simple. This actually helps the startups to get in touch with their end customers very easily and also make more out of the available resources.

2. Working Fast

Working fast is another important phase of learning for corporations. What happens in corporations when a problem is found? Here’s the process, you find out the problem, have a group discussion, find out the problem, consult with the supervisor, get approval from the department head, execute the solution, report effectiveness and so on.

But in startup culture, it is very much appreciated to do these things faster. The basic reason of this cultural build up is investment deficiency. As most of the startups has limited investment, they are bound to work fast and skip the unnecessary mail loops. Through this, the maximum output is ensured in the minimum amount of time.

3. Hyper-Collaboration

Now many of you might know the terms ‘hyper-collaboration’ and ‘experience partners’. Hyper-collaboration defines a certain form of collaboration among multiple ventures to support each other in certain activities; so that they can grow together. And experience partnership is a strategic move between two organizations who can share their resources systematically to make sure the optimum output. For example, I knew a SaaS product company and a image based AI company working together in a shared office space. They share one’s technical resources with the other to maintain minimal technical support. On the other hand, the other company provides branding support to the AI based startup.

The concept here is to find the solution with multiple partnership and to ask the wider community to share expertise whenever the firm lacks experience.

4. Being Brave to Uncertainty

If you ask me one single strength that startups have, I will say it is ‘to deal with uncertainty and failure’. These lean businesses always face uncertainty and failure in financial, operation and resource related aspects. And they became stronger while developing the survival instinct.

In a corporation, most of the time there is a plenty of resources to get a job done; besides the financial backbone is strong mostly. So, if any uncertain situation occurs or any failure show no mercy; it doesn’t hurt the corporation much. Or, I will say, in most of the case it doesn’t even feel the lack of comfort. But it affects in long-run. Renowned corporations ended up getting merged or sold off majority shares to another corporation for this lack of discomfort in uncertain situations.

The learning of not being afraid is a very important one. Google develops hundreds of products in times, and an huge number of these products are thrown away just because those didn’t work. If you don;t experience it how can you embrace it? So, getting afraid of failure/uncertainty is not an option, rather learning from it, is.