“[T]his is not a book about ‘business planning.’ It’s a book about, in a sense, ‘business discovering.’”

Business planning is a major industry, with management consultants, industry experts, and other finance professionals all spending significant time attempting to predict the future of a firm (see Antifragile for why that doesn’t work). Mullins and Komisar, on the other hand, have a much more simple principle. Try things. And if they don’t work, try something else.

This simple point flows from what I found a fairly profound observation. Big businesses may be wrestling with “Big Data”, they point out, but entrepreneurs usually have a want of data; they don’t even have enough information to know if their guesses and assumptions are correct. Instead of recognizing their limited data, however, many entrepreneurs leap immediately into business planning, writing up 50 page business proposals. By the time they find out their idea doesn’t work, they’re already mentally committed, and fail to properly adapt to new information.

The best entrepreneurs, however, remain open to Plan B. They test their original assumptions, and use the data they get to modify their plans as necessary, sometimes changing their entire product, as with the founders of Paypal, who started off trying to market a cell phone encryption method, for which they posted a free demo of a payment system online. When the demo proved more popular than the encryption, they adapted, and the rest is history. Experiment, measure, analyze, repeat.

For someone with a business idea in mind, the book is an excellent walkthrough in carefully keeping an eye on your business model while maintaining flexibility. For those not interested in entrepreneurship, the book can feel repetitive, but I think there’s some wisdom there for the rest of us too. In many situations, there’s no need to pick a single best plan and charge forward; we can experiment a little to discover information, whether that means doing a summer internship, trying a new diet, or starting up a small business of our own. It seems to me we too often stress about making the best decision in the first place, rather than trying out an option and learning from it. Life, rather conveniently, has very little to do with Dragon’s Den.