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舊金山的Warfield劇場(chǎng)隔壁是傳說(shuō)中的搖滾圣殿，多年來(lái)經(jīng)歷過(guò)鮑勃·迪倫，感恩而死樂(lè)隊(duì)，還有槍炮與玫瑰。走進(jìn)啤酒味飄香的大廳，坐進(jìn)空曠大廳陳舊的椅子里，眼前是衣冠楚楚的商業(yè)精英們大談創(chuàng)業(yè)，似乎有些格格不入。

演講者們觀點(diǎn)不算犀利，不過(guò)提倡的觀點(diǎn)相當(dāng)類似。零售商諾德斯特姆負(fù)責(zé)用戶體驗(yàn)的副總裁喬迪·舒克娜非常熱衷“顧客第一的思路”，還有“緊跟變化，勇敢走出舒適區(qū)的能力”。咨詢公司Strategyzer鼓勵(lì)客戶開展 “創(chuàng)新短跑”活動(dòng)，亞力克斯·奧斯特瓦爾德敦促各公司建立“21世紀(jì)組織架構(gòu)”。連聯(lián)邦政府代表也掌握了新鮮術(shù)語(yǔ)。美國(guó)國(guó)際發(fā)展署前創(chuàng)新主管安·梅·張就警告非營(yíng)利機(jī)構(gòu)，不要用“虛榮指標(biāo)”衡量成功，還稱“擴(kuò)張?zhí)臁睍?huì)造成巨大風(fēng)險(xiǎn)。

這場(chǎng)“布道大會(huì)”去年11月舉辦，演講者有個(gè)共同特征：都是《精益創(chuàng)業(yè)》一書作者埃里克·萊斯的支持者。這本書掀起一場(chǎng)積極的運(yùn)動(dòng)，本次論壇就由忠實(shí)粉絲舉辦。論壇主要討論的話題包括，最核心概念“最簡(jiǎn)化可行產(chǎn)品”，簡(jiǎn)稱“MVP”，意思是企業(yè)應(yīng)該用最快，成本也最低的產(chǎn)品測(cè)試市場(chǎng)。另一個(gè)概念是“轉(zhuǎn)向”，意思是遭遇挫折時(shí)業(yè)務(wù)應(yīng)轉(zhuǎn)向新方向。這些概念都來(lái)自萊斯2011年寫的書，英語(yǔ)版已賣出超過(guò)百萬(wàn)本，已被翻譯成另外30種語(yǔ)言。

萊斯對(duì)創(chuàng)業(yè)圈的影響可謂巨大。各處的創(chuàng)業(yè)者都接受了他提出的概念和建議策略，包括與用戶一同測(cè)試假設(shè)，判斷創(chuàng)新成功與否時(shí)應(yīng)跳出收入和市場(chǎng)份額等會(huì)計(jì)原則。“毫無(wú)疑問(wèn)，過(guò)去十年他對(duì)創(chuàng)業(yè)公司的思路產(chǎn)生了巨大的影響，”在斯坦福商學(xué)院教授創(chuàng)業(yè)課程的羅布·西格爾表示。

39歲的大師本人也參與了論壇，他在劇場(chǎng)深處一個(gè)綠色房間里主持論壇。交流者還包括國(guó)家安全局的團(tuán)隊(duì)，該團(tuán)隊(duì)也因踐行他提出的概念獲得成效，是個(gè)有關(guān)核密碼的項(xiàng)目。他跟賈斯汀·羅森斯坦親切擁抱，據(jù)說(shuō)羅森斯坦（自稱）發(fā)明了Facebook上的“點(diǎn)贊”按鈕，現(xiàn)在負(fù)責(zé)一家名叫Asana的協(xié)作軟件創(chuàng)業(yè)公司。對(duì)萊斯來(lái)說(shuō)，論壇更多出于感情，而不是為了盈利。他留著絡(luò)腮胡，臉龐特別像演員塞斯·羅根。但在他一人開創(chuàng)的咨詢、出版和演講事業(yè)王國(guó)里，論壇的作用還是巨大的。

如今，萊斯咨詢過(guò)的公司已數(shù)以百計(jì)。雖然他最大的關(guān)注點(diǎn)仍是創(chuàng)業(yè)公司，但《精益創(chuàng)業(yè)》發(fā)行后的幾年里，他越發(fā)意識(shí)到業(yè)界對(duì)相關(guān)概念的理解太窄。他表示，只要提供適當(dāng)?shù)沫h(huán)境，再古板的公司也可以鼓勵(lì)創(chuàng)新。去年10月，萊斯的第二本書《創(chuàng)業(yè)之道》中就直接點(diǎn)名大公司，特別是通用電氣。通用電氣也是最早聘請(qǐng)萊斯當(dāng)顧問(wèn)，隨后大規(guī)模推廣其理念。

萊斯并沒(méi)有主動(dòng)找大公司，其實(shí)大公司在過(guò)去某些時(shí)候曾充滿創(chuàng)新精神，但往往變得官僚主義，注重流程且厭惡風(fēng)險(xiǎn)。大公司找到萊斯時(shí)，他發(fā)現(xiàn)還是有些事可以做。“有幾年我過(guò)著雙面生活，”他說(shuō)。“一面是跟成功企業(yè)家談，他們想在擴(kuò)大規(guī)模的同時(shí)保留創(chuàng)業(yè)公司的DNA。與此同時(shí)另一群人則拼命想找回失去的創(chuàng)業(yè)精神DNA。”

萊斯按照自己提出的建議，不斷測(cè)試假設(shè)，不斷問(wèn)問(wèn)題，終于找到了商業(yè)世界普適的創(chuàng)新方法。他的想法看起來(lái)有些直接，寫下來(lái)感覺(jué)有點(diǎn)太明顯，但就像其他好老師一樣，他能將觀點(diǎn)解釋得很有說(shuō)服力，在發(fā)表演講、談話和提供指導(dǎo)時(shí)能讓人覺(jué)得很有緊迫感。他還走出大膽一步，開創(chuàng)了自己的公司，目標(biāo)是打造新股票交易所，解決華爾街的短期主義傾向問(wèn)題，也為他熱愛(ài)的創(chuàng)業(yè)公司創(chuàng)始人們提供服務(wù)。看來(lái)萊斯真是少有能切實(shí)踐行理念的好老師，他一直努力提升課程對(duì)各種領(lǐng)導(dǎo)者的價(jià)值。

精益創(chuàng)業(yè)論壇之后幾天，萊斯一直在舊金山家附近公寓里寫作。此處環(huán)境郁郁蔥蔥，房間里墻壁和沙發(fā)都是白色，是個(gè)很方便的隱居之處，也很適合思考。萊斯很需要安靜的環(huán)境。去年深秋前，他為了宣傳新書去了紐約、費(fèi)城、波士頓，然后又去紐約，還有洛杉磯。之后一周他計(jì)劃在辛辛那提的寶潔公司開設(shè)工作組，之后飛去倫敦。

他從沒(méi)想到需求如此之多。《精益創(chuàng)業(yè)》一書出版后，萊斯收到雪片般的邀請(qǐng)，他頻頻出席演講，提供咨詢和指導(dǎo)，這也是他之前從未想過(guò)要從事的職業(yè)。“就這么發(fā)生了，”他說(shuō)。他還表示，接受人們花錢聽他介紹自己思想這個(gè)事都花了點(diǎn)時(shí)間。萊斯由此搖身一變，躋身硅谷杰出的創(chuàng)業(yè)大師。“這樣的個(gè)人介紹可能不太好，”他邊說(shuō)邊思考自己言論的影響，“但我其實(shí)對(duì)商業(yè)沒(méi)那么大興趣，至少?zèng)]有談話對(duì)象們興趣大。我其實(shí)不喜歡經(jīng)商。”他說(shuō)時(shí)任通用電氣總裁的杰弗里·伊梅爾特曾經(jīng)問(wèn)他，如果讓他掌管通用電氣會(huì)怎樣。“我說(shuō)，‘我會(huì)死的。10分鐘都撐不了。這份工作會(huì)壓垮我。’”

萊斯更喜歡的是寫代碼，還有開班公司。他在圣地亞哥長(zhǎng)大，雙親都是物理學(xué)家和教授。（他有兩個(gè)妹妹，一位是精神科醫(yī)生，另一位是聯(lián)邦檢察官。萊斯的妻子塔拉·莫爾是斯坦福大學(xué)MBA，職業(yè)是人生導(dǎo)師，也是一位作家。“我是家族里的黑馬，”他打趣說(shuō)，“家里感恩節(jié)聚會(huì)時(shí)我總是唯一一個(gè)沒(méi)有高等學(xué)歷的人。”）他在耶魯學(xué)習(xí)哲學(xué)，后來(lái)改為計(jì)算機(jī)科學(xué)，輟學(xué)創(chuàng)業(yè)后慘遭失敗，后來(lái)返回學(xué)校完成了學(xué)業(yè)。畢業(yè)后他迅速去硅谷再次創(chuàng)業(yè)，但還是失敗。

后來(lái)他成立了IMVU公司，也開始研究后來(lái)變?yōu)榫鎰?chuàng)業(yè)思路的理論。IMVU經(jīng)歷了多次“轉(zhuǎn)向”，目前主要為社交網(wǎng)絡(luò)制作虛擬形象，公司產(chǎn)品是一款處理軟件，出了名的迭代迅速，人們稱贊其開發(fā)“敏捷”。萊斯和聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人威爾·哈維有自己的導(dǎo)師，是加州伯克利分校教授史蒂夫·布蘭克，他也要繼續(xù)寫創(chuàng)業(yè)方面的暢銷書《四步走向創(chuàng)業(yè)頓悟》。“每周四我們都會(huì)坐BART”——灣區(qū)的主要交通線——“去伯克利聽他講課，”哈維回憶說(shuō)。

諷刺的是，雖然后來(lái)萊斯在創(chuàng)業(yè)圈地位崇高，但他的創(chuàng)業(yè)生涯不算多輝煌。IMVU如今仍是私有狀態(tài)，盈利性收入不過(guò)6000萬(wàn)美元，按硅谷的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)不算什么。2008年萊斯離職，先在風(fēng)投公司凱鵬華盈待了一陣，后來(lái)專心寫博客，內(nèi)容是他對(duì)如何創(chuàng)業(yè)和擴(kuò)大規(guī)模的觀察。博客越發(fā)受歡迎，之后他開始寫書，轉(zhuǎn)向演講和咨詢事業(yè)。之后大公司開始找上門。

《創(chuàng)業(yè)之道》書中開頭不久，萊斯就比較了“老派公司”和“現(xiàn)代公司”的特征。二者的差異可能會(huì)讓在老派公司工作的人受打擊，迫切希望公司轉(zhuǎn)型。據(jù)萊斯分析，老派公司最重視季度業(yè)績(jī)，有通曉各種職能的專家，跟蹤的指標(biāo)都讓管理者看起來(lái)很能干。中層管理者喜歡重復(fù)之前的工作，而且影響力很大。相比之下，現(xiàn)代公司更注重長(zhǎng)遠(yuǎn)，擅長(zhǎng)組建跨部門團(tuán)隊(duì)，迅速實(shí)驗(yàn)，更關(guān)注業(yè)務(wù)運(yùn)營(yíng)的實(shí)際影響。總之，現(xiàn)代公司讓具有創(chuàng)新精神的人擔(dān)任改革先鋒。

萊斯的批評(píng)針對(duì)了當(dāng)今商業(yè)世界大部分公司。一開始他完全抵制大企業(yè)。但他逐漸發(fā)現(xiàn)理念中存在矛盾。萊斯對(duì)創(chuàng)業(yè)有個(gè)標(biāo)準(zhǔn)定義，“在極端不確定情況下實(shí)施創(chuàng)新的人類組織。”他在演講時(shí)反復(fù)強(qiáng)調(diào)概念，也指出定義“并未指明企業(yè)的規(guī)模，發(fā)展階段，存在時(shí)間，領(lǐng)域和行業(yè)”等等。“最核心的一點(diǎn)是不確定性，”他表示。“所以只要符合定義就是創(chuàng)業(yè)，”不論規(guī)模多大。后來(lái)，隨著越來(lái)越多《財(cái)富》500強(qiáng)公司請(qǐng)他介紹，也有人說(shuō)他吹牛，他的思路越發(fā)清晰，也接受挑戰(zhàn)開始與大公司合作。

萊斯認(rèn)為大公司發(fā)展的重點(diǎn)是，別總想著規(guī)模。大公司要成立小團(tuán)隊(duì)實(shí)施創(chuàng)新，充分授權(quán)而且要持續(xù)保護(hù)，這也是他的追隨者稱道的“21世紀(jì)組織架構(gòu)”核心。一旦成立，小團(tuán)隊(duì)可以跳出常規(guī)采取各種實(shí)驗(yàn)，采取與公司之前開發(fā)產(chǎn)品不同的方式。

測(cè)試精益創(chuàng)業(yè)理念最著名的大公司當(dāng)屬寶潔。這家消費(fèi)品巨頭向來(lái)有創(chuàng)新的傳統(tǒng)，旗下有20個(gè)品牌，年銷售額超過(guò)10億美元。但近年來(lái)增長(zhǎng)停滯。2016年寶潔聘請(qǐng)萊斯擔(dān)任顧問(wèn)，給領(lǐng)導(dǎo)層將精益創(chuàng)業(yè)。寶潔首席研發(fā)和創(chuàng)新官凱西·費(fèi)什稱，萊斯鼓勵(lì)寶潔認(rèn)真考慮加快研發(fā)并測(cè)試簡(jiǎn)化產(chǎn)品。“我們公司很大，有很多人負(fù)責(zé)創(chuàng)新，”她表示。“現(xiàn)在成立了小型的專門團(tuán)隊(duì)，最小的只有三個(gè)人。”（團(tuán)隊(duì)簡(jiǎn)化后有什么意想不到的好處？開會(huì)少多了。）

時(shí)任通用電氣總裁的杰弗里·伊梅爾特曾經(jīng)問(wèn)他，如果讓他掌管通用電氣會(huì)怎樣。“我說(shuō)，‘我會(huì)死的。10分鐘都撐不了。這份工作會(huì)壓垮我。’”

寶潔的精益創(chuàng)業(yè)實(shí)驗(yàn)要等多年才能顯現(xiàn)效果，但在改變大企業(yè)思維方面已經(jīng)初見成效。舉例來(lái)說(shuō)，去年秋天寶潔推出了簡(jiǎn)化版新款護(hù)舒寶和丹碧絲衛(wèi)生巾，并開始在美國(guó)市場(chǎng)測(cè)試。寶潔采取了“事務(wù)性簡(jiǎn)化實(shí)驗(yàn)”，在200家塔吉特商店推出了早期版本。寶潔希望千禧一代消費(fèi)者會(huì)喜歡新款。對(duì)比之前要等三年才能推出新款，這種簡(jiǎn)化迅速的測(cè)試證實(shí)消費(fèi)者愿意支付額外費(fèi)用嘗鮮。

雖然此前寶潔也會(huì)做態(tài)度研究和大規(guī)模市場(chǎng)調(diào)研，“現(xiàn)在我們很早就能做出‘充滿信心’的假設(shè)，”費(fèi)什表示。三款衛(wèi)生巾中有一款表現(xiàn)不好。如果在過(guò)去，整個(gè)測(cè)試會(huì)受阻。但現(xiàn)在寶潔只要繼續(xù)推另外兩款即可。

萊斯最出名的案例要數(shù)通用電氣，多達(dá)60000名員工接受了有關(guān)精益創(chuàng)業(yè)的培訓(xùn)。他們?cè)跀?shù)百個(gè)項(xiàng)目里事件，從加速設(shè)計(jì)飛機(jī)引擎到“數(shù)字化”風(fēng)力電場(chǎng)到幫助客戶決定如何更好地配置通用電氣渦輪。萊斯的方法在通用電氣還有個(gè)新名字，叫“快速法”，管理者表示這套思路已經(jīng)融入整個(gè)公司。“現(xiàn)在公司上下通行‘快速法’語(yǔ)言，”通用電氣文化轉(zhuǎn)型負(fù)責(zé)人詹尼斯·森佩爾表示。“具體來(lái)說(shuō)包括重視客戶價(jià)值，行動(dòng)前先理解問(wèn)題，還有認(rèn)真考慮資本配置等等。”

即便一些老將陸續(xù)離開通用電氣，包括伊梅爾特和曾負(fù)責(zé)創(chuàng)新事務(wù)的副總裁貝斯·康斯托克，但萊斯的方法，也即“快速法”似乎已在通用電氣扎根，由此可見其影響力。當(dāng)然了，通用電氣的問(wèn)題可能不只是缺乏創(chuàng)新精神。新上任的首席執(zhí)行官約翰·弗蘭納里就對(duì)增長(zhǎng)乏力很不滿意，提出要拆分公司。萊斯表示對(duì)通用電氣的前景“謹(jǐn)慎樂(lè)觀”，還相信快速法會(huì)發(fā)揮重要作用。

萊斯在《創(chuàng)業(yè)之道》結(jié)尾處理了一個(gè)長(zhǎng)期困擾他的問(wèn)題。他能幫助創(chuàng)業(yè)公司增長(zhǎng)，卻無(wú)法改變上市公司面臨的問(wèn)題，因?yàn)槭袌?chǎng)過(guò)于癡迷短期財(cái)務(wù)數(shù)據(jù)，這種氛圍不鼓勵(lì)冒險(xiǎn)因而扼殺創(chuàng)新。他建議成立長(zhǎng)期股票交易所，公司只用專注長(zhǎng)期發(fā)展，長(zhǎng)期持有的投資者會(huì)獲得豐厚回報(bào)。其商業(yè)模式將涉及與傳統(tǒng)股票交易所競(jìng)爭(zhēng)公司首發(fā)上市。

但沒(méi)人按照萊斯的建議行動(dòng)，幾年后他成立了一家名叫長(zhǎng)期股票交易所（LTSE）的公司，開始不斷向證券交易委員會(huì)遞交文件，申請(qǐng)掛牌和交易股票的資質(zhì)。2016年公司獲得多家風(fēng)投1900萬(wàn)美元投資，包括安德森·霍洛維茨等科技圈大佬。按照萊斯設(shè)想，新交易所將采取全新的監(jiān)管制度，例如禁止出具季報(bào)。投資者層面，LTSE建議采取終身投票制，長(zhǎng)期持有股票的投資者投票權(quán)會(huì)增加。交易員仍然可以買進(jìn)賣出股票，但對(duì)管理層幾乎不構(gòu)成影響。

雖然向來(lái)理性，但萊斯提到LTSE需求時(shí)還是忍不住充滿義憤。他指出，現(xiàn)在越來(lái)越少公司愿意上市，因?yàn)楸３炙接谢癄顟B(tài)遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)好過(guò)應(yīng)付一幫無(wú)情的激進(jìn)投資者和其他只看短期的假投資者。“如果這種趨勢(shì)持續(xù)下去會(huì)怎樣，我真是不明白，”他表示。“感覺(jué)最后市場(chǎng)上只能留下，比方說(shuō)七家超級(jí)集團(tuán)，其他公司都保持私有。這種政策結(jié)果太可怕。”

然而，理論想轉(zhuǎn)化為實(shí)際挑戰(zhàn)多多，雖然公司里15名員工全力奮戰(zhàn)，萊斯擔(dān)任首席執(zhí)行官，但LTSE仍然停留在紙面上。去年秋天，萊斯表示年底會(huì)向監(jiān)管部門提交文件，但到12月公司發(fā)展“轉(zhuǎn)向”。其與一家新股票交易所IEX達(dá)成合作，IEX創(chuàng)始人曾出現(xiàn)在邁克爾·劉易斯暢銷書《閃擊者：華爾街的反抗》中。合作后在LTSE掛牌的股票可以在IEX交易，IEX已經(jīng)獲得證券交易委員會(huì)許可。

另外，市場(chǎng)上還存在普遍擔(dān)心，重視長(zhǎng)期投資者會(huì)降低掛牌公司的價(jià)值。LTSE并不同意這一觀點(diǎn)：“我們打造的系統(tǒng)里，企業(yè)可以提升到更高標(biāo)準(zhǔn)，”曾在奧巴馬政府財(cái)政部和紐交所任職的米歇爾·格林尼表示，目前她擔(dān)任LTSE首席政策官。“市場(chǎng)鼓勵(lì)管理層為長(zhǎng)遠(yuǎn)打算時(shí)，企業(yè)才能創(chuàng)造更多價(jià)值。”

目前來(lái)看，LTSE面臨的還是先有蛋還是先有雞的困境。沒(méi)有證券交易委員會(huì)的批準(zhǔn)，就沒(méi)法吸引公司掛牌；但即便獲得許可，在此掛牌的公司還要拿發(fā)展過(guò)程中最重要的融資機(jī)會(huì)去測(cè)試一個(gè)尚未證明的概念。“有公司真正掛牌之前，還有很多未知數(shù)，”Twitter前首席執(zhí)行官也是LTSE投資人迪克·科斯特羅表示。專門負(fù)責(zé)幫創(chuàng)業(yè)公司上市的LTSE顧問(wèn)利斯·布耶爾補(bǔ)充說(shuō)：“埃里克做的是好事，但前路十分艱辛。高度監(jiān)管的市場(chǎng)里，變革是十分緩慢的。”

然而萊斯還是全力投入LTSE發(fā)展，現(xiàn)在是他的全職工作。他基本上不接新的咨詢業(yè)務(wù)，他也表示“咨詢行業(yè)的競(jìng)爭(zhēng)也越發(fā)激烈。現(xiàn)在做創(chuàng)業(yè)咨詢的人已經(jīng)大把。”

說(shuō)有大把人加入創(chuàng)業(yè)咨詢可能都保守了。由于企業(yè)對(duì)精益創(chuàng)業(yè)需求太旺盛，Bionic、Moves the Needle和Leanstack之類紛紛投身其中，精益創(chuàng)業(yè)論壇上還有更多類似公司熱情洋溢，準(zhǔn)備爭(zhēng)奪萊斯做不了的領(lǐng)域。萊斯仍然在接業(yè)務(wù)。前通用電氣高管史蒂芬·里郭利負(fù)責(zé)溢價(jià)創(chuàng)新咨詢公司，向荷蘭銀行ING和香港的怡和洋行等機(jī)構(gòu)提供萊斯式咨詢服務(wù)。里郭利和萊斯還做起副業(yè)，成立了名叫企業(yè)創(chuàng)新社區(qū)的會(huì)員組織，主要聚集大公司負(fù)責(zé)創(chuàng)新的高管，分享優(yōu)秀案例。創(chuàng)始會(huì)員包括通用電氣、大都會(huì)人壽、寶潔、先鋒集團(tuán)、ING和惠普等。

萊斯有兩個(gè)孩子，他表示現(xiàn)在沒(méi)什么時(shí)間享受愛(ài)好。但他經(jīng)常彈鋼琴和吉他，最近還將極客一面與音樂(lè)結(jié)合起來(lái)。“我自學(xué)了聲音剪輯和音頻工程，”他表示。“我喜歡樂(lè)器領(lǐng)域可編程和模式化趨勢(shì)。專家們對(duì)樂(lè)器的物理特性進(jìn)行數(shù)學(xué)模擬，然后產(chǎn)生的對(duì)應(yīng)的聲波。”如果萊斯繼續(xù)精進(jìn)研究，沒(méi)準(zhǔn)有一天能在Warfield劇場(chǎng)開演奏會(huì)呢。（財(cái)富中文網(wǎng)）

本文另一版本刊登于2018年3月出版的《財(cái)富》雜志，標(biāo)題為《意料之外的創(chuàng)業(yè)大師》。

譯者：Pessy

審校：夏林

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The Warfield Theatre in San Francisco’s gritty Mid-Market neighborhood is a legendary temple of rock, host over the years to the likes of Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Guns N’ Roses. It’s jarring, then, to walk through its beer-soaked halls, plop down onto a threadbare seat in the cavernous auditorium, and listen to smartly dressed business types evangelizing about entrepreneurialism.

The speakers are an eclectic group, yet they’re singing from the same buzzword-laden hymnal. Jyoti Shukla, vice president of user experience at retailer Nordstrom, enthuses about having a “customer-first mindset” and “an ability to ride with change and embrace discomfort.” Alex Osterwalder of the consultancy Strategyzer, which coaches clients through “innovation sprints,” urges attendees to have a “21st-century org chart.” Even outposts of the federal government have mastered the lingo. Ann Mei Chang, a former chief innovation officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, warns nonprofits not to measure success with “vanity metrics” and decries the perils of “ramping too quickly.”

The occasion for these sermons is the annual Lean Startup Conference, in November, and the speakers share a common trait: They are disciples of Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, the seminal tract that spawned a self-proclaimed movement of which this is a convocation of the faithful. The mantras they repeat—most prominently “minimum viable product,” or MVP, a company’s quickest, cheapest way to test the market, and “pivot,” which is what businesses do when failure demands a new approach—all come from Ries’s 2011 book, which has sold more than a million copies in English and has been published in 30 languages.

The mark Ries has made on the startup landscape cannot be overstated. Entrepreneurs everywhere have adopted his vocabulary as well as his methods, including testing their hypotheses with customers and gauging the success of innovation with relevant accounting measurements beyond revenues and market share. “He unequivocally has been as impactful on the mindset of startups as anyone else in the last decade,” says Rob Siegel, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s business school.

The 39-year-old guru himself is here too, holding court in a dimly lit greenroom in the bowels of the theater. He huddles with a grateful team from the National Security Agency, which has implemented his techniques—on a project involving nuclear codes, no less. He bro-hugs Justin Rosenstein, who holds the dubious distinction (by his own admission) of having invented the “l(fā)ike” button on Facebook and now runs Asana, a collaboration software startup. The conference is more labor of love than profit-making effort for Ries, who sports a mustache-less scraggly beard and, in a pinch, could play stunt double for actor Seth Rogen. But the event also is an important linchpin in his one-man consulting, publishing, and speaking empire.

The companies that Ries has advised now number in the hundreds. And while startups are his passion, in the years since The Lean Startup appeared he came to realize the term had been too narrowly understood. Properly nurtured, he now says, innovation lurks in the bellies of even the stodgiest corporations. Ries’s second book, The Startup Way, published in October, focuses squarely on big companies, notably General Electric, one of the first to hire Ries as a coach and to widely deploy his teachings.

Ries didn’t seek out big companies, which all had been innovative at some point but all too often have become bureaucratic, process-oriented, and risk-averse. But once they found him, he realized he could help. “I had several years where I was living a double life,” he says. “On the one hand I was talking with these guys”—successful entrepreneurs—“who were trying to figure out how to retain that startup DNA as they scaled. At the same time a separate group of people were trying to recapture that DNA they had lost.”

By following his own advice of relentlessly testing his hypotheses and asking questions, Ries hit on a formula for corporate innovation that’s relevant across the gamut of the business world. His ideas can seem straightforward or even obvious on the page, but like other adept teachers, he’s able to make them compelling and urgent in lectures, conversations, and coaching sessions. Today, he’s even got a fledgling startup of his own, an audacious gambit to create a new stock exchange focused on squelching the scourge of short-termism on Wall Street—to the benefit of founders of his beloved startups. Ries, it turns out, is the rare teacher who practices what he preaches, potentially making his lessons all the more valuable for leaders of all stripes.

A few days after the Lean Startup Conference wraps, Ries has holed up in an apartment he keeps as a writing retreat just down the street from his home in a leafy San Francisco neighborhood. The walls and the couches are all white. It’s a simple hideaway, a good place for reflection. Ries needs the tranquil setting. By late fall, he already has traveled to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New York again, and Los Angeles to promote the new book; he has plans for a workshop with Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati the following week and a trip to London after that.

He never expected to be in such demand. After The Lean Startup came out, Ries was inundated with invitations to lecture, consult, and coach, a career he hadn’t previously contemplated. “It just happened,” he says, adding that it took a while to get used to people paying him to tell them what he thought. Indeed, Ries volunteers a startling admission for Silicon Valley’s preeminent business guru. “This is probably not good for the profile,” he says, the author-as-subject anticipating the impact of his words, “but I don’t really like business that much, at least not as much as most of the people I talk to. I actually kind of feel bad about it.” He says Jeffrey Immelt, the erstwhile chief executive of GE, once asked what Ries would do if he ran the conglomerate. “I was like, ‘I would die. I wouldn’t last 10 minutes. It would destroy me.’?”

What came naturally to Ries was writing code and starting companies. He grew up in San Diego, where both of his parents are physicians and professors. (He has two younger sisters, one a psychiatrist and the other a federal prosecutor; Ries’s wife, Tara Mohr, a Stanford MBA, is a life coach and author. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” he quips, “the only one at Thanksgiving without an advanced degree.”) He studied philosophy and then computer science at Yale, dropped out to pursue a startup that flopped, then finished school. He quickly made his way to Silicon Valley to work on yet another failed startup.

At his next company, IMVU, Ries began developing the theories that would lead to the lean startup methodology. IMVU, which after several “pivots” now makes virtual avatars for social networks, became known for rapid product iteration, a process software people call “agile” development. Ries and his cofounder, Will Harvey, had a guru of their own, University of California at Berkeley professor Steve Blank, who would go on to write his own innovation bestseller, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. “Every Thursday we would get on BART”—the Bay Area’s mass transit line—“and go to Berkeley to audit his class,” recalls Harvey.

The irony of Ries’s subsequent exalted status among entrepreneurs is that none of his startups amounted to much. IMVU, still privately held with $60 million in profitable revenue today, is a plodder by Silicon Valley standards. Ries left in 2008, hung out for a time at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and mostly devoted himself to an increasingly popular blog about his observations on starting and scaling companies. The blog got him going on the book, which led to his speaking and consulting career. Then big companies started calling.

Early in The Startup Way, Ries compares the traits of “an old-fashioned company” and a “modern company.” The contrasts are devastating for anyone who works at the former and wishes their employer were more like the latter. An old-fashioned company, in Ries’s estimation, focuses on quarterly results, has experts in functionalized silos, and tracks metrics that make managers look good. Middle managers, intent on doing things how they’ve always been done, hold tremendous sway. A modern company, in contrast, is long-term-oriented, utilizes cross-functional teams, deploys rapid experiments, and measures the meaningful impact of business operations. Above all, modern companies empower entrepreneurial thinkers as change agents.

Ries’s criticisms amount to an indictment of most of the corporate world. Initially, he flat-out resisted becoming a sage for big businesses. But he gradually came to see a contradiction in his own philosophy. Ries has a standard definition of a startup, “a human institution designed to bring something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” His rinse-and-repeat presentation on the subject notes that his definition “doesn’t say anything about size of company, stage, its age, sector, industry,” and so on. “It’s fundamentally about uncertainty,” he says. “And therefore anyone who meets this definition is an entrepreneur,” regardless of scale. Over time, as more denizens of the Fortune 500 came to hear him speak—and called his bluff—his intellectual curiosity got the better of him, and he accepted the challenge of working with megacorporations.

Ries reckoned that the trick for big companies was to stop thinking about their size. They needed to form small groups devoted to the practice of innovation, and empower and protect them on a continual basis—as the core of the “21st-century org chart” his followers admire. Once formed, these smaller units could run experiments that were outside the norm of how their companies might typically launch products.

One of the most storied companies to give lean-startup thinking a whirl is Procter & Gamble. The consumer products Goliath has an impressive history of innovation—it has 20 brands with more than $1 billion in annual sales—but in recent years, growth had stalled. The company hired Ries in 2016 to speak to its top commercial leaders. He inspired them to get serious about speedier and leaner product testing, says Kathy Fish, P&G’s chief research, development, and innovation officer. “Because we’re a big company we had lots of people involved with innovation,” she says. “Now we have small, dedicated groups, as small as three people.” (One unexpected bonus of lean teams? Fewer meetings.)

[/bs-quote]Ries was asked what he would do if he were CEO of GE. “I was like, ‘I would die. I wouldn’t last 10 minutes. It would destroy me.’”[/bs-quote]

While P&G’s lean-startup experiments will take years to play out, it already has seen a measurable change in its corporate mindset. This past fall, for example, it began market-testing new versions of its Always and Tampax feminine pads in the U.S. that featured simpler ingredients. It deployed a “transactional learning experiment” that introduced early versions in 200 Target stores. P&G hoped the products would be popular with millennials, and the limited, speedy test—they got to market in a year compared with the typical three—confirmed that customers would pay a premium.

Whereas before P&G would have conducted attitudinal research and large market tests, “now we get clear early on ‘leap-of-faith’ assumptions,” says Fish. One of the three sizes for the pad initially tested poorly with consumers. Traditionally, that would have stalled the entire test; instead, P&G moved forward with two sizes.

At Ries’s most prominent test case, General Electric, upwards of 60,000 employees have been trained in lean-startup methods. They have worked on hundreds of projects, from speedily designed aircraft engines to “digital” wind farms that help customers determine how best to deploy GE turbines. The Ries way even has its own name at GE, FastWorks, which executives describe as a corporate way of life. “The language of the company has become the FastWorks language,” says Janice Semper, culture transformation leader at GE. “That includes customer value, understanding problems before we start, and being smart about our thinking before we decide on capital allocation.”

It speaks to the impact of Ries’s approach that FastWorks appears to have stuck at GE despite the departure of many of its champions, including Immelt and Beth Comstock, the vice chair who previously led GE’s innovation efforts. Of course, GE’s problems may be bigger than being more innovative. New CEO John Flannery is so frustrated with anemic growth that he has floated the idea of breaking up the company. Ries says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about GE, and confident the FastWorks efforts will bear meaningful fruit.

At the very end of The Lean Startup, Ries addressed a policy matter that was bugging him. He could help startups grow, but he couldn’t do much about the environment they’d face as public companies in a marketplace obsessed with short-term financial goals—a climate that stifles innovation by discouraging risk-taking. He proposed a long-term stock exchange, where companies would agree to focus on the long haul and investors would be rewarded for holding on to their shares longer. Its business model would involve competing for IPO listings against traditional stock exchanges.

No one acted on Ries’s proposal, so a few years later, he founded a company, called it the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and began the arduous process of getting permission from the Securities and Exchange Commission to list and trade stocks. In 2016 it raised $19 million from a bevy of VC firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, and tech-industry luminaries. It instituted novel governance rules, like forbidding quarterly earnings guidance. On the investor side, LTSE proposed so-called tenured voting, which gives shareholders who keep their stakes more voting power. Traders would be free to dart in and out of stocks, but they’d have little to no influence over management.

A rational guy, Ries can approach righteous indignation when talking about the need for LTSE. Fewer companies are going public, he notes, because it’s easier to stay private than face the wrath of ruthless activists and other short-term actors. “I don’t really understand what people’s plan is if this trend continues,” he says. “We’re going to wind up with, like, seven public companies that are mega-conglomerates, and everything else is private. That’s a terrible policy outcome.”

Translating theory into reality has proved challenging, however, and despite the efforts of a 15-person staff, with Ries as CEO, LTSE remains mostly an idea. Last fall, Ries said LTSE would file with securities regulators by the end of the year, but in December the startup pivoted. It reached an agreement with IEX, a new stock exchange whose founders starred in Michael Lewis’s bestseller Flash Boys, whereby LTSE-listed stocks will trade on IEX, which already earned SEC approval.

There’s also the niggling and widespread fear that favoring long-term investors will decrease values of the listed companies. It’s an assertion LTSE disputes: “We’re creating a system that allows companies to be held to a higher standard,” says Michelle Greene, an Obama administration Treasury and NYSE veteran who is LTSE’s chief policy officer. “When you really enable management to manage for the long term, that will enable them to create more value.”

For now, LTSE faces classic chicken-and-egg dilemmas. It can’t list any company without SEC approval; but once it can, any company that chooses it for its IPO will risk the most important fundraising event in its history on an unproven concept. “Before you take a company public there’s a lot you don’t know,” says Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter and an LTSE investor. Adds LTSE adviser Lise Buyer, who runs a firm that helps startups go public: “Eric is trying to do good things, but it will be a long hard climb. Change comes very slowly to regulated markets.”

Still, Ries is so committed to the Long-Term Stock Exchange that it’s now his full-time job. He generally isn’t taking on new consulting clients. But he notes that “a lot of other entities have taken up the slack. There’s now a cottage industry of people who do startup consulting.”

Cottage industry may be an understatement. Corporate hunger for lean-startup help is so robust that groups with names like Bionic, Moves the Needle, and Leanstack—and oodles more that roamed the halls at the Lean Startup Conference—are ready to step in where Ries can’t. And Ries still has his hand in the game. Stephen Liguori, an ex–GE executive, now runs an innovation consulting firm that plays Ries-ian roles for the likes of Dutch bank ING and Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson. Liguori and Ries also have a new side business, a membership organization called the Corporate Entrepreneurship Community, that brings together innovation executives from large companies to compare best practices. Charter members include GE, MetLife, P&G, Vanguard, ING, and HP .

Ries, who has two small children, says there isn’t much time left for hobbies. But he does play piano and guitar, and he has a new musical passion that indulges his geeky side. “I taught myself sound editing and audio engineering,” he says. “I like the programmable and modeled instrument trend. They build a mathematical simulation of the physics of what the instrument would be, and then generate the sound waves from that.” If he gets good enough, Ries might even play the Warfield one day.

A version of this article appears in the March 2018 issue of Fortune with the headline “The Accidental Guru.” We’ve included affiliate links in this article.