Hi, I’m Brant Cooper,

Your friendly neighborhood course designer and instructor. Way back in the day, circa 2008, a group of tech entrepreneurs came together in a Google Group to discuss practical applications of Steve Blank’s Customer Development framework as he described in a compilation of university lecture notes entitled Four Steps to the Epiphany. Meanwhile, Eric Ries, a student of Blank’s was blogging about his ideas combining customer development with agile software development principles, which he came to call Lean Startup.

In 2010, Patrick Vlaskovits and I wrote the first edition of the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, dubbed by many as “The Startup Bluebook”—the first book to discuss the practical application of these principles. It quickly made its way into the hands of startup founders, forward-thinking corporate innovators, university business school professors, and accelerator program directors around the globe.

In 2011, Eric Ries published the wildly popular The Lean Startup, which took aim at helping not only startup entrepreneurs, but corporate innovators. Eric put lean innovation practices on the map, combining customer development, with agile and lean manufacturing principles.

In 2013 Patrick and I followed up with our second book, the widely acclaimed NY Times bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur (TLE). TLE provided in-depth instruction on how to develop empathy for customers, run rapid experiments to test assumptions, and use metrics to focus work and measure progress on any endeavor facing uncertainty.

Since 2014, I’ve been running Moves the Needle, Inc, with the aspiration of helping large organizations apply the “entrepreneurial spirit.” It’s not that they need to act like startups, as a matter of fact there are many good reasons not to. But while the world is changing fast, the way we structure and manage work is stuck in the middle of the 20th century. Improvement comes from empowering workers to excerise their intelligence and creativity.

My experiences doing this work led to my most recent book, Disruption Proof, published by Hachette in the Fall of 2021. I wrote Disruption Proof in the heart of the pandemic, which really drove the point home: we’re not in the Industrial Age anymore. Increased complexity and massive uncertainty poses new challenges to the institutions we’ve grown to depend on, not only big companies, but education, government, and startups, but also unions, non-profits and other NGOs. The way we manage and structure work is fundamentally changing.