What is scaling, exactly? In business terms, it means spreading effective practices throughout a company, which seems pretty straightforward. Chances are most of your experiences with scaling optimal work practices have been simple and uncomplicated – inspirational posters, emails, checklists and the occasional “pep” meeting. However, at the end of the day most of the things just don’t cut it. Successfully scaling a company is complex and requires a lot of time and perseverance.
In Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao’s Scaling Up Excellence, you’re provided with a game plan for how to infuse your organization with the best everyone can offer. It requires a lot streamlining as well as flexibility, and yes – mistakes will inevitably be made (in some of their examples, even Google and Pixar step in it!). If you’re engaged, open-minded and committed to the long haul, then this is the book for you. It takes time for a company to change, but you just might be the right person to do it.
Here is the summary from Amazon:
“Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows.
“Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries – including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare – Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people – rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.
“Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.”
