Lean Start-Up Course for Co-operatives :D

Following through the links from this thread,

I found this online course. :smiley:

I’ll have a dig through and post back later. :smiley:

Oh I have no idea where you found that, but hope it’s a useful course!

I skimmed it myself — it was a bit on the “intro business model canvas”, and less coop-specific information that I was looking for (e.g. legal, regulatory, governance, financial), but hopefully it’s useful for you!

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I found it via the USFWC website,

https://www.usworker.coop/resources/startups/ :smiley:

Still working through the Lean Co-op course. :smiley:

Much chewiness in the course material, though some of the secondary reference sources are starting to suffer from linkrot.

One of the most useful things was that they managed to formulate something that i had been trying to say to @harry during one of the Outlandish January parties.

We’d been talking about why we worked on Co-op’s.

While Harry had been talking about social responsibility and fairness, i was thinking more about my experiences of getting ripped-off in Start-Up Land. :smiley:

I came to my understanding of Enlightened Class Self-Interest the painful way. :smiley:

One of the first things that is talked about, is the dichotomy between the business model, and, the ownership model.

It doesn’t matter if a business is a co-operative or a privately-held organisation. Both will fail if they aren’t following a viable, profitable energy-niche within the business ecology.

The ownership model only matters if you succeed, but it’s more effective to lay out the parameters before the work begins, as it avoids wasting time with future arguments.

I’ve been in a number of bands that fell apart due to this.

One of the first bands i was in, disintegrated due to exactly this problem.

We were a six-piece band playing Cajun music and Elvis covers.

We were getting good gigs, and people were enjoying the music.

When we were offered a management deal, we found that we wanted to go in three different directions, as we had never even discussed where we wanted to go.

I much later worked out ways that we could have integrated all of the various directions into a functional whole, but hindsight is always 20/20. :smiley:

This lead me to using three stages of questions for working with new bands:

  • The Tour-Bus Test. - Do we get on as people, or will we want to strangle each other part way through the tour?

  • The Jam Test - Are your visions of music and aesthetics compatible? Can you create great things together?

  • The Business Test. - Do you have compatible visions of where you want to go when trying to generate an energy-surplus?

  • :smiley:

Regularly i come across 1 of 3, and less commonly 2 of 3, but if you can find a group with 3 of 3, and you have a viable band. :smiley:

Like i said, i’m finding the course material to be chewy and interesting. :smiley: