Book of the Week: Scaling Up Excellence
05 Apr 2015
I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Huggy Rao about scaling. Scaling Up Excellence is a book Stanford professors, Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton, wrote about the problems that occur when companies try to scale up. Things start breaking, what worked before doesn’t work anymore. How do you grow without getting into a clusterfug? The book goes over a lot of examples since it is complied from 7 years of talking to people, but it is not as crisp and clear as I wanted it to be since a lot of things are nuanced. Reoccurring Cast It seems I can’t read a book with Silicon Valley start ups without Bill Campbell’s name appearing. Seems like he’s more “the Don” than “the Coach”. Also, when anybody talks about the d.school, they bring up the pediatric MRI example. If d.school and design thinking is truly effective, wouldn’t there be more than one example that really hugs the heart strings? I like design thinking, but only have a singular example makes me lose faith. It is like talking about Michael Jordan when trying to get people to play basketball. You may like basketball, but you aren’t going to fly like Mike. Scaling Mantras
- Spread a mindset, not just a footprint.
- Engage all the senses.
- Link short-term realities to long-term dreams.
- Accelerate accountability.
- Fear the clusterfug.
- Scaling requires both addition and subtraction.
- Slow down to scale faster—and better—down the road
The main thing I came away with from reading this book is that scaling is hard. Premortem One useful tool in addressing the problems of scaling is the premortem. You imagine what success looks like and you imagine what failure looks like and point out the things that lead to each outcome. This allows the team to identify problems ahead of time and account for them. By eliminating risks to the project, the project should be more likely to succeed.