Humility – Jeff Gothelf 009

By Steve Berg

Jeff Gothelf, (@jboogie) is an author, speaker and organizational designer for Technology, Software and Internet companies. He is also a big proponent of Lean UX. I speak to him primarily about the material in his book ‘Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously’. We start out by understanding the ‘why’ of humility. We then talk about key the principals in continuous development (ex. ‘customer value equals business value’ and ‘humility equals agility’) and how that leads to an emergent mindset. We take this a step further in determining why an emergent mindset is a precursor for innovation. Finally, we talk about how to build this skill set as a founder and how to recognize it as an investor. I think this discussion will resonate particularly well for technical founders.