Scaling Up Excellence | Getting to More Without Settling For Less | ROBERT SUTTON and HUGGY RAO
ROBERT SUTTON is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on evidence-based management and the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action. He is the author of
several books including The Knowing-Doing Gap, Weird Ideas That Work and Good Boss, Bad Boss. Dr. Sutton is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.
HUGGY RAO is professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He studies the social and cultural causes of organizational change. He is the author of Market Rebels. Dr. Rao graduated from Case Western Reserve University and Andhra University, India.
Scaling Up Excellence
One of the great challenges facing leaders is how you can take something which is working well in one part of your organization and get everyone else doing the same thing. This should be easy but in practice, it's harder to scale up and
spread
excellence that you might logically expect.
Excellence
You always have to approach scaling as a marathon rather than a sprint. There are seven mantras that you should use when scaling:
The Seven Mantras of Scaling
- Spread a mindset, not just a footprint
- When scaling, engage all the senses
- Link short-term realities to long-term dreams
- Enhance personal accountability
- Fear (and avoid) the clusterfug
- Use both addition and subtraction
- Slow down to scale faster in the future
Pure and simple, scaling requires grit. You just have to keep going, even when you face daunting and prolonged challenges. Without grit, you cannot and will not succeed in scaling up.
There are no easy paths to spreading excellence from the few to the many. It's definitely a vexing challenge, but get it right and you can unleash enormous levels of contagious pride within the organization. The potential fruits of success which come about when scaling succeeds make it all worthwhile.
Mantra #1 – Spread a mindset, not just a footprint
Scaling isn't just a matter of putting your logo on as many people and in as many places as possible and thinking the job is done. To scale, you've got to change how people think, feel and act. You've got to spread the right mindset first and foremost.
Mantra #2 – When scaling, engage all the senses
When scaling, bolster the right mindset by adding sights, sounds, smells and cues which activate the senses. Make it feasible for people to live, breathe and experience for themselves what results when they act the right way.
Mantra #3 – Link short-term realities to long-term dreams
Very few managers are able to make sure short-term stuff gets done well while at the
same time keeping the big picture perspective in mind. To scale excellence, you have to find ways to link the realities of now with the sweet dreams you hope to realize later on.
Mantra #4 – Accelerate and enhance personal accountability
Scaling only works when you manage to build in the feeling "I own this place and this place owns me." The more people who feel responsibility and accountability, the faster your scaling initiatives will move forward.
Mantra #5 – Fear (and avoid) the "clusterfug"
A "clusterfug" is when a leader or decision makers makes bad decisions because of
impatience, incompetence or illusions of grandeur on their part. To let scaling happen,
you've got to replace instructions from headquarters with front-line know-how.
Mantra #6 – Realize scaling requires both addition and subtraction
Successful scaling not only requires that you start doing better things but also that you stop doing what is not helpful. You've got to keep reminding yourself that “what got us here may not necessarily get us to where we want to be in the future.”
Mantra #7 – Slow down to scale faster
At some stage, you've got to change from automatically doing the old things to
consciously doing something different and better. From time to time, you've got to remind people to stop relying on their instincts and start acting differently.
Author Interview with Robert Sutton for Scaling Up Excellence
Below are some of my notes/takeaways/favorite excerpts.
- "uncover pockets of exemplary performance"
- "Scaling well hinges on making the right trade-offs between mandating that new people and places become perfect clones of some original model (a “Catholic” approach) versus encouraging local variation, experimentation, and customization (a “Buddhist” approach)"
- "organizations that spread and sustain excellence are infused with a “relentless restlessness”—that often uncomfortable urge for constant innovation, driven by the nagging feeling that things are never quite good enough"
- "When big organizations scale well, they focus on “moving a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet.”"
- "Scaling is analogous to a ground war rather than an air war because developing, spreading, and updating a mindset requires relentless vigilance"
- "we advocate “the Goldilocks Theory of Bureaucracy.” Much like the children’s story, scaling requires injecting just enough structure, hierarchy, and process at the right time. The key challenge, then, is knowing when to add more complexity, when it is “just right,” and when to wait a bit longer"
