Bootstrapping

I write a lot about business trends and concepts.  I also spend a lot of time reading through business literature (is that an oxymoron?). We are drowning in business concepts – there seems to be a new one introduced every five minutes. I admit that I am partially to blame for burdening over-stressed executives with even more concepts.

And yet . . . there’s one concept that I haven’t seen developed very systematically in serious business analysis – it’s the management technique of bootstrapping. It’s been on my mind recently because I have been doing a lot of work recently with JSB on new management techniques in China and India that represent a form of bootstrapping.  I am also familiar with the concept from work on the evolution of complex adaptive systems. And the concept seems to be resurfacing in technology circles as part of the continuing interest in Doug Engelbart’s work back in the 1960’s (see for example the book by Thierry Bardini on Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing).

Wikipedia does a nice job of exploring the meanings of bootstrapping in a variety of disciplines and contexts.  At its core, though, in the words of Wikipedia, bootstrapping refers to “processes whereby a complex system emerges by starting simply and, bit by bit, developing more complex capabilities on top of the simpler ones.”  In other words, bootstrapping is about capability building.

It is a widespread phenomenon, visible in biological evolution (indeed, it may even have played a role in the emergence of life itself) and a wide range of other complex adaptive systems. In this context, most of the discussions treat bootstrapping as an emergent process – it is something that plays out on its own, governed by its own dynamics.

I am more interested in bootstrapping as a set of management techniques that can be applied to build capabilities more rapidly and more effectively.  This has been discussed a bit in the context of entrepreneurial startups – for example, Guy Kawasaki’s new book The Art of the Start devotes a chapter to the topic. A Google search turns up a lot of stuff in a self-help genre (e.g., “10 easy ways to bootstrap your business”).

I am curious why more serious work hasn’t been done on this topic. Maybe I just haven’t run across the right material.  If so, I would welcome pointers to serious and systematic treatments of the management techniques involved in bootstrapping.

It is a powerful concept with implications for business far beyond the startup world. It potentially helps businesses to cope with accelerating change and growing uncertainty, provides an interesting new way to think about leverage, learning and innovation, enhances scalability of business operations and may even provide a key to at least one form of increasing returns. It is also a critical concept for economic development.

Perhaps as businesses grow larger and gain access to more resources they lose interest in bootstrapping as a management technique.  That would be a big mistake.  Bootstrapping imposes both a discipline and a creativity that has enormous value regardless of the scale of operations.  If we need a reminder of that, just look at the bootstrapping that continues to shape the vast ecosystems encircling our globe.