CORPORATES CAN LEARN A THING OR TWO FROM STARTUPS

You hear it everywhere: “Startups aren’t good experiences to learn from.” “Startups aren’t easy to work in.” “The startup environment is entirely different than the corporate one.” “You shouldn’t work in a startup if you’re just starting your career.” There are people who will want to have you think being a startup is the most unforgivable thing in the world, and running one is a job for teenagers who have no aspirations.

Well, you can send all those people this blog post. 

While, yes - it’s entirely correct that startups are different from corporations, I wouldn’t say they don’t bear their benefits. And instead of me trying to convince the corporate fans to see the light, let me just start with what startups are not good at, and side with them all. 

Yes, starting a company isn’t good for people who have had no experience in the job market. It’s singular people who are so talented and their ideas so creative that they succeed DESPITE the challenges the startup world has to offer. Opening up a company is hard for people who don’t have a hardworking work ethic, and this is something you learn with time and experience. 

Startups are also not good with repetition. They say what differentiates good from great achievements is the ability to consistently replicate the effort and work that was put into the same product or service time and time again, and yes, startups are not good with that. Usually, the people working there are inspired, and hocus pocus. You’ll see meetings getting canceled left and right, and lots of work not being done at all. You may also see lots of work being done in a minimal amount of time as well, so it really depends on the situation.

Startups can also have no set processes or room for optimization. Everything is a spur-of-the-moment decision that may be made differently in some other day, and, conversely, there is no room to optimize because things are changing on a dime.

First-time founders are also people who can survive one month, thrive the next, and hit rock bottom the one after, so it’s hard to count on them as reliable partners. 

With all that being said, here are the things that startups are good at that corporate can only learn from.

• Decisionmaking agility: Most of the time, having agile, on-the-spot thinking is crucial for resolving situations that require ad hoc brain capacity and space. Being flexible, and knowing how to harness the moment and base your decisions on that is incredibly important so that you can show you can take the extra mile when needed, and that you, too, are human.
• The structure: You don’t always need to have blockades of papers, walls, doors closed and all that on the floor. You can be sitting next to the decision makers, or at least an open-door-away from them. Having additional space doesn’t always mean more headspace, and it certainly does nothing for the team spirit. 
• Every day is new: There is a lot of movement in a startup. There is a lot going on and things are changing all the time. There is no moment of stillness or plateau of not going anywhere. It’s either up or down. This brings life and movement into one’s thinking too.
• Growth: And perhaps the biggest opportunity people wouldn’t have otherwise is this of growth. Startups offer a tremendous amount of that, whether or not one succeeds or fails. The corporate world is more cruel than that. You can sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day for the duration of a month before you get to do something new and exciting. 
• Approval process: Need to talk to the boss of the boss to get someone’s holiday approved? Yeah, think again. Corporations can learn from the “zero out the middleman” structure startups have. It promotes more human-to-human communication and relationship development, as well as experience exchange between people and departments.

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