Author One-on-One: Robert Suttonand Huggy Rao talk about Scaling Up Excellence
Robert Sutton: Why don’t we start off with why we wrote this book?
Huggy Rao: We wanted to give the executives we teach and advise better answers. In 2006, we launched an executive education program at Stanford called Customer-focused Innovation. Executives in the program kept asking us different versions of the same question. Their companies all had a pocket or two where people were customer focused. The problem was that there just wasn’t enough of it. They asked how they could spread such excellence and do it fast. We scoured academic research and practical books on leaders and teams. We found a lot on topics such as leadership and innovation. But we couldn’t find a single business book devoted to this problem, which we started calling “the problem of more” or the challenge of “scaling up excellence.”
We spent the next seven years studying and writing about it. I believe that this is the first major business or leadership book on scaling. We worked hard to write an approachable and useful book, but also one that digs into this vexing challenge in some depth. We offer much hard won advice, but no instant and easy cures.
Bob, why don’t you tell people about our research? It was quite an adventure.
RS: We started by doing interviews and case studies, and digging up the most rigorous studies we could find on scaling. But we also wanted to reach out to people who were in the thick of scaling challenges. So we checked repeatedly with senior leaders such as Kaiser Permanente’s Louise Liang (who led a successful information technology rollout in the largest U.S. private healthcare system), Facebook executive’s Chris Cox and Mike Schroepfer (who grew the engineering organization), and JetBlue Airlines pilot and executive Bonny Simi (who led a bottom-up effort to create and scale up a better system for dealing with operational challenges caused by bad weather). We wanted to make sure that the challenges we discussed, the stories we told, and advice we offered rang true to these and hundreds of other scaling up veterans we talked to during those seven years.
HR: What do you say when people ask you “what do you mean by scaling?”
RS: I tell them that we fixed our focus on a simple, but tough, question: If your organization has a bit of excellence, a pocket of goodness, how do you spread it? Early on in the project, I saw an interview with the famous folk singer Pete Seeger. He said something like “Sometimes the only thing wrong with it is there isn’t enough of it.” A lovely way to describe the main problem we tackled.
HR: I was struck by how similar the scaling challenges were that different organizations faced. The challenges of growing Google, of opening 180 highly standardized Bridge International Academy schools for poor children in Africa, and spreading practices for preventing infections to over 3000 hospitals sound quite different on first blush. But they turned out to be remarkably similar in many ways once we looked closely.
RS: How so?
HR: In every case, successful scaling didn’t mean just creating as big a footprint as possible, as fast possible – it required spreading a shared mindset that guided how people thought and acted. We learned that, especially in cases of fast and effective scaling, the teams that guided these efforts often slowed down at key junctures – to think about what they are doing and to develop true excellence – so they could move faster later. Scaling takes both patience and persistence, in concert with an obsessive focus on making progress toward long term goals every hour of every day.
RS: We also learned that the key decisions and scaling principles were remarkably similar across different kinds of organizations. For example every organization and project gets more complex as it expands. More processes, layers, locations, and people are required. As a result, scaling nearly always adds “cognitive load” -- increased demands -- on people and teams. If it is not dealt with well, people feel overwhelmed. It becomes hard to get simple things done. In the best organizations, to paraphrase Twitter’s head of engineering Chris Fry, leaders use the hierarchy to destroy bad bureaucracy -- to make things easier rather than harder for people. Fry’s advice holds in every scaling case we studied.
RS: Let’s end with the question that EVERYONE asks me about you. Is your name really Huggy?
HR: My real name is Hayagreeva, but my family and friends have always called me Huggy. I thought “Huggy” would be easier for people to pronounce and remember.
RS: It’s been quite a collaboration. Huggy was relentlessly optimistic during even the toughest days. Huggy is among the smartest and most imaginative organizational researchers on the planet. The rate at which he generates ideas astounds me. One minute he might be talking about “linking hot causes to cool solution,” the next “scaling is about going from bad to great, not so much good to great.”
We worked with so many terrific people facing scaling challenges, from entrepreneurs and startups, to senior executives at big corporations, to leaders and teams in nonprofits and large healthcare systems. But we stayed focused on one goal: Writing a book would ring true and be useful to anyone who strives to develop excellence in organizations and spreading it to others.
"Scaling isn't just about getting bigger...it's about spreading exceptional ideas, systems, or business models and then persuading–ideally, inspiring–others to make them their own."
-Inc. Magazine
“With a huge amount of research and insight within its covers, this is a timely read for young ambitious companies.” -Trevor Clawson, Forbes
"A great read that provides real, practical advice whether you're a team of 5 or 50,000. Sutton and Rao find just the right stories to show how almost any team can get bigger and better." –Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations, Google
“Scaling Up Excellence is one of the finest business books you'll ever read. It is rich with vivid examples, deep research, and practical advice on the toughest challenge organizations confront: how to spread success from a few small pockets of an organization to its entire fabric. Whether you're an entrepreneur who wants to get big, a CEO who wants to avoid stagnation, or a non-profit executive who wants make a deeper difference, Scaling Up Excellence is an essential read -- a playbook that belongs on the desk of every leader.” -Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
“Innovation at scale and speed is our goal. Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao show us how to do it more often and better, knowing that scale matters.” –Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Office, GE
“The Internet creates new possibilities for scaling, but scaling rarely happens because of technology alone. This insightful book shares the methods and strategies that successful leaders rely on to spread the beliefs and behaviors that can accelerate an organization's growth while simultaneously improving its processes.” -Reid Hoffman, co-founder/chairman of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 NYT bestseller The Start-up of You
“Growth and reinvention are key to winning, especially in tech. In Scaling Up Excellence, Sutton and Rao outline a real-world view of the challenges leaders face, and provide wisdom and practical tips about how to master them. I loved the insights.” -Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe Systems
“Startups sow the seeds of their culture from the very first day. Yet their ultimate success depends on knowing when and how to scale. Drawing on first hand accounts from a wide range of industries, Scaling Up Excellence is the first book to offer a detailed examination of the best practices needed to successfully scale without diluting the very qualities that made a company successful in the first place. An important book for corporations and entrepreneurs alike.” -Eric Ries, bestselling author of The Lean Startup
"Maintaining excellence while growing is full of pitfalls and pain, and requires a great deal of thoughtfulness. Scaling Up Excellence gives us a well-crafted framework for thinking about and addressing the nitty-gritty problems on the ground without getting derailed by lofty goals. Sutton and Rao keep us focused on the personal actions required for tackling this leadership challenge.” -Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation Studios
“One of the challenges faced by any complex organization is how to improve performance by sharing best practices within the organization. Too often, scaling is done as an art. To be done well, it needs to be a science. ‘Scaling Up Excellence’ elevates scaling to a core competency instead of a talent. This is a worthwhile book to read.” -George Halvorson, chairman of the board, Kaiser Permanente
“A must-read. Renowned experts Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao are the first to tackle a pervasive problem that every leader faces: spreading and multiplying success. This landmark book is full of rich examples, powerful studies, and actionable insights for anyone who cares about making groups or organizations more effective.” - Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of Give and Take
“Sutton and Rao provide an illuminating perspective that is particularly useful for leaders and teams about to embark on their own challenging journey to scaling excellence. The stories and studies shared by the authors provide valuable strategic and practical advice, which will increase your odds of success when they are combined with the real “grit” required to make improvements.” -Ann L. Lee, senior vice president, Genentech and Global Head of pharma technical development, Roche
"We are all searching for new ways to build more effective teams, startups, and organizations that will stand the test of time. Through compelling research, stories, and narrative, Scaling Up Excellence will show you how to help your best ideas reach a much wider audience. If you want to have a big impact . . . make sure your entire team reads this book." –Tom Rath, bestselling author of Strengthsfinder 2.0
“An engaging exploration of a powerful and frequently neglected source of competitive advantage: Finding ways to spread and sustain the best ideas and practices we already know how to do. Packed with inspiring examples of how to make it happen –or miss out.” -Martin Riant, Group President Baby, Feminine and Family Care, Procter & Gamble Co.
“If you want your organization to expand and grow without losing what makes you special, this is the book for you. Sutton and Rao have written a must-read handbook for scaling.” -Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick
“Scaling Up Excellence offers a strong antidote to the common pap--the delusions, impatience and incompetence-- that too often frustrate reforms and keep many good ideas from achieving their goals. Through engaging accounts of both organizational successes and colossal failures, Sutton and Rao offer practical wisdom for scaling improvements in complex institutions. Anyone involved in the work of improvement should hold this book close at hand.” -Anthony S. Bryk, president, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
“Rather than a one size fits all recipe for what to do in scaling up your company, Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao offer guidelines for action in easy to read terms, based on case studies and research conducted over the last seven years. If you are interested in excellence using the principle of Less is More, this is the book to read." -Riccardo Illy, Chairman, Grupo Illy, S.p.A
“Scaling Up Excellence is the best book I’ve ever seen on making an organization’s vision come true. Sutton and Rao have created a deeply practical guide that is also a great read, grounded equally in astonishing stories and rigorous research. No matter what you do for a living, read this book to figure out how to link your “short-term realities to long-term dreams.” - Teresa M. Amabile, professor, Harvard Business School and coauthor, The Progress Principle
“Taking a small, manageable organization and making it into a big, successful enterprise is a major challenge in healthcare or any other industry. Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao take the mystery out of ‘going large’ with memorable mantras and fascinating case studies. Scaling Up Excellence shows the high roads – and the pitfalls – on the way to bigger and better. Delos M. Cosgrove MD, CEO and President, Cleveland Clinic
“Inspiring stories, compelling research, and actionable ideas masterfully woven together and immediately usable by any entrepreneur or manager.” -Clara Shih, CEO and Founder of Hearsay Social, member of Starbucks Board of Directors
“Sustaining exceptional performance in growing organizations is critical in today’s world. Sutton and Rao bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to identifying best practices in a straightforward and accessible way. If you want to grow your business, you need this book.” – Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone
"Rao and Sutton have hit on an important challenge for leaders in every organization - companies, social sector and government: how do you scale what works, and do it faster. The challenge of finding pockets of excellence and changing mindsets and behavior so that success becomes the norm not abnormal is very real for those who want to make excellence stick. Scaling up Excellence is a useful roadmap for today's change leaders" -Lenny Mendonca, Director Emeritus, McKinsey and Company, Founder, Half Moon Bay Brewing Company
“Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao’s book provides insights on the key principles of scaling for excellence. For entrepreneurs or business leaders at the forefront of organizational growth, “Scaling up excellence” is a treasure trove of case studies and industry showcases.” -N. R. Narayana Murthy, Executive Chairman, Infosys Limited
"Scaling Up Excellence is a masterpiece. I have been wrestling with the same conundrum for 30 years, and I simply marvel at the way Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao have disentangled this supremely important Gordian knot."-Tom Peters, bestselling author of In Search of Excellence
About the Author
Robert I. Sutton is professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, where he is co-founder of the Center for Work Technology and Organizations, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Institute of Design (“the d.school”). Sutton was named as one of 10 “B-School All-Stars” by BusinessWeek, which they described as “professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia.” His books include The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), Weird Ideas the Work, and two New York Times bestsellers, The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss.
Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University, where he studies the social and cultural causes of organizational change. His honors include the W. Richard Scott Distinguished Award for Scholarship from the American Sociological Association and Sidney Levy Teaching Award from the Kellogg School of Management. He is the author of Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovation,” Which Intel’s Andy Grove praised for providing “shrewd analysis” and an “aha moment.”
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
It's a Ground War, Not Just an Air War
Going Slower to Scale Faster (and Better) Later
Listen. This is the most important thing that we learned, the one to keep in mind every day if you are bent on spreading excellence to more people and places: those who master what venture capitalist Ben Horowitz calls "the black art of scaling a human organization" act as if they are fighting a ground war, not just an air war.
In the air wars of World War II, commanders typically ordered pilots to drop bombs or strafe some general area in hopes of damaging the enemy. Unfortunately, such attacks were woefully inaccurate. Political scientist Robert Pape estimated that, during World War II, "only about 18 percent of U.S. bombs fell within 1,000 feet of their targets, and only 20 percent of British bombs dropped at night fell within 5 miles." Even when air strikes were more accurate, Allied leaders learned that without ground operations--where soldiers were close to targets, gaining or losing territory a few yards at a time--victory was impossible. Even today, when guidance systems ensure that 70 percent of bombs fall within thirty feet of targets, an air war alone is rarely enough to defeat an enemy. After reviewing NATO's seventy-eight-day air war in Serbia that was meant to force Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic to ban ethnic cleansing, retired U.S. Air Force General Merrill McPeak concluded, "In a major blunder, the use of ground troops was ruled out from the beginning."
Similarly, savvy leaders know that just bombarding employees with a quick PowerPoint presentation, a few days of training, or an inspirational speech won't cut it if they want to spread some goodness from the few to the many. Certainly, there are junctures in every scaling effort when it is wise to choose the easier path or secure a quick victory. Yet as we dug into case after case, and study after study, we saw that every allegedly easy and speedy scaling success turned out to be one we just hadn't understood very well. Scaling requires grinding it out, and pressing each person, team, group, division, or organization to make one small change after another in what they believe, feel, or do.
That is what Claudia Kotchka learned during her seven-year effort to spread innovation practices at Procter & Gamble. As vice president of design innovation and strategy, Kotchka started with a tiny team and one project and ended with over three hundred innovation experts embedded in dozens of businesses. We asked her the most important lesson that she had gleaned about scaling. Kotchka responded that she was naturally impatient, someone who wanted things done "right now" and as quickly and easily as possible. This action orientation served her team well, driving them to make progress each day, find savvy shortcuts, and achieve quick wins. But Kotchka explained that her team would have failed to scale if this penchant for action hadn't been blended with patience and persistence. "My CEO, A. G. Lafley, reminded me how important it was again and again." Kotchka's advice is reminiscent of something a McKinsey consultant--a veteran of the scaling wars--told us: 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."
This kind of discipline is equally important in small and young organizations. It has been a way of life for Shannon May and her team since they launched Bridge International Academies, the chain of low-cost and standardized elementary schools that we described in the Preface. Consider the grueling gauntlet that Bridge created for screening and training new teachers. In early 2012, they hired eight hundred teachers for fifty-one new schools and eighty-three existing schools. These are tough jobs: students attend school from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each weekday and for half a day on Saturday, and teachers are required to maximize the time that students spend "on task and actively engaged." A thirty-person team from Bridge interviewed ten thousand candidates and gave each a battery of tests: reading, writing, and math exams. The team also had candidates give short speeches and hold one-on-one conversations with them to assess their ability to deliver material and interact with students. They invited 1,400 finalists (in two batches of 700) to a five-week training camp, where all were paid to learn Bridge's mindset, skills, and procedures. The team then selected the best 800 to teach Bridge's students.
The Bridge team doesn't just view scaling as the Problem of More. As they expand, their goal isn't just to maintain the status quo. The team works day after day to make their system better. They never leave well enough alone. For example, they keep improving the technologies and content delivered via the phones and "hacked" Nook tablets used to collect money from parents, pay staff, deliver teaching materials, and monitor student and teacher performance. May also described a new effort to deliver questions and assignments to teachers that are customized for students in the same class at different ability levels.
This kind of determination and discipline also defines people who spread excellence from the bottom or middle of organizations. In 1991, Andy Papa graduated from Stanford, where he had played as a defensive lineman on the football team for four years. Through luck and persistence, Papa landed a job on a NASCAR racing team based in North Carolina, which included being on the pit crew that changed tires, poured in fuel, made adjustments, and did quick repairs during races. Papa asked when the crew practiced pit stops. The answer was they didn't practice; most worked as mechanics during the week and didn't have time. A lightbulb went off in Papa's head: by transferring "the athletic mindset" he had learned in football to pit stops, they could get faster and more consistent--a big advantage, as the gap between winners and losers is so small in NASCAR races, with less than one second often separating the first- and second-place cars. Papa talked his crew into practicing a couple times a week for just twenty or thirty minutes, he started analyzing film of pit stops, and he tested different techniques (such as coiling the air hose in a figure-eight shape instead of a circle to reduce tangles). The crew's average time dropped from about twenty-two to twenty seconds and, more important, the frequency of awful pit stops plummeted.
Papa eventually took this zeal for the "athletic mindset" to Hendrick Motorsports. He spent years as their "athletic director," overseeing the pit crews that serve elite drivers including Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Members of each crew are selected, trained, and coached by Papa and his colleagues, who enforce an exacting regimen of physical training, practice, and learning aimed at making stops faster (about fourteen seconds is the current goal) and more consistent during the thirty-six grueling races they compete in per year (each with six to twelve pit stops). This discipline has helped Hendrick win more championships than any NASCAR ownership group in history--including an unprecedented run of five Sprint Cup championships by Jimmie Johnson between 2006 and 2010.
Claudia Kotchka, Shannon May, and Andy Papa have traveled different paths. But they all have something in common, an essential quality for grinding out the ground war and overcoming the inevitable setbacks and nasty surprises. These scaling stars have grit. Researcher Angela Duckworth and her colleagues found that grit "entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon, his or her advantage is stamina." Grit drives people to succeed, especially when they face daunting and prolonged challenges--a hallmark of every scaling effort.
Scaling Mantras
This book zeros in on how and where to focus such perseverance as your organization struggles and strives to scale up excellence. We've identified reliable signs that scaling is going well or badly, and we've distilled these signals into seven mantras. If you are embarking on a scaling effort, memorize them, teach them to others, and invent ways to keep them firmly in focus--especially when the going gets rough.
1. Spread a Mindset, Not Just a Footprint
There is a big difference between distributing your banner, logo, or motto as far and wide as possible versus having a deep and enduring influence on how employees and customers think, act, feel, and filter information. Scaling unfolds with less friction and more consistency when the people propelling it agree on what is right and wrong--and on what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Effective scaling depends on believing and living a shared mindset throughout your group, division, or organization. Scaling is analogous to a ground war rather than an air war because developing, spreading, and updating a mindset requires relentless vigilance. It requires stating the beliefs and living the behavior, and then doing so again and again. These shared convictions reduce confusion, disagreements, and unnecessary dead ends--and diminish the chances that excellence will fade as your footprint expands.
Facebook demonstrates what it takes to instill and sustain a mindset even when an organization's footprint is spreading like wildfire. The company's crazy climb began that legendary night in February 2004 when nineteen-year-old Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg pounded down beers and programmed the crude but captivating first iteration of the site. Facebook amassed over a million users by the end of 2004 and a billion by the end of 2012. Facebook's future is impossible to know. Despite stumbles including a botched public offering, some pundits predict it will become more dominant than Apple and Google; others predict that it will flail and fade away like America Online.
Whatever Facebook's fate, the twists and turns of how the company grew that colossal footprint in the eight short years before its 2012 public offering are instructive. By slowing down and shunning shortcuts when it came to developing the people who powered their expansion, leaders infused the company with the will, skill, and resilience to move quickly when and where it mattered. We've witnessed their ability to sustain this focus no matter how wild and out of control the ride became since 2006, when our conversations, interviews, and projects with people at Facebook began. They've done so despite brutal time pressures and distractions: adding as many as 3 million users per week and enduring intense media scrutiny (most start-ups aren't besieged with questions about toppling the Egyptian and Libyan governments), a Hollywood blockbuster that portrayed Zuckerberg in an unflattering light, nasty lawsuits, and withering user revolts--750,000 users objected to the News Feed feature in 2006 and millions complained about "Timeline" in 2012.
This devotion to growing and grooming Facebook's people happened informally at first. In the early years, Zuckerberg was jammed together with his employees in cramped offices. He talked constantly about his convictions and why they powered Facebook's strategy--and employees watched and worked with him as he lived those beliefs. Once the company got too big for Zuckerberg to personally influence every employee, it took to more systematic methods, notably "Bootcamp." Facebook engineers and other product developers are hired after rounds of grueling interviews to assess their technical skills and cultural fit. But they are not placed in a specific job until six weeks after coming aboard. Management has a hunch about which role each new hire will play. Yet the final decision is not made until the end of "Bootcamp," which is designed and led almost entirely by engineers--not the HR staff.
During Bootcamp, every new hire does small chores for a dozen or so diverse groups. Chris Cox, Facebook's thirty-one-year-old vice president of product, emphasizes that Bootcamp isn't just for figuring out which role is best for each newcomer. A more crucial aim is to infect each with the Facebook mindset. Bootcamp requires recruits to live Facebook's most sacred belief: "Move fast and break things." As Cox puts it, it is one thing to tell new engineers that they can change the code on the Facebook site. It is another thing for them to actually "touch the metal." He added, "We tell them, put your hand on it. Grab it. Now bend it." Cox told us about the newcomer whose dad called to say, "There's a problem with this drop-down menu." He called back the next day: "I fixed it, Dad. Did you see that?" That is the Facebook mindset--if you want people to move fast and fix things, they'd better feel safe to break some stuff along the way. When it comes to developing the site, going slow and trying to do things perfectly is taboo at Facebook. As engineer Sanjeev Singh explained, if you keep waiting for people to tell you what to do, don't ask for help when you get stuck, and won't show others your work until it is perfect, "you won't last long at Facebook."
Bootcamp instills other beliefs about what is sacred and taboo at Facebook. Engineers are expected to understand the code base, not just the part they tend to each day. Working on many different parts helps newcomers grasp the big picture. Rotating through many groups also sets the expectation that any role they play at Facebook won't last long. Chris Cox worked as a programmer, a product designer, a project manager, the head of human resources, and the vice president of product during his first six years at the company. After Bootcamp, these beliefs continue to be reinforced. Engineer Jason Sobel explained that Facebook doesn't just tell new engineers that they likely won't be in any job for long; they live this philosophy via a "nearly mandatory" program called "hack-a-month" where--each year--they are "loaned" to another group for a month.
SCALING MANTRAS
1. Spread a mindset, not just a footprint.
Running up the numbers and putting your logo on as many people and places as possible isn't enough.
2. Engage all the senses.
Bolster the mindset you want to spread with supportive sights, sounds, smells, and other subtle cues that people may barely notice, if at all.
3. Link short-term realities to long-term dreams.
Hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later.
4. Accelerate accountability.
Build in the feeling that "I own the place and the place owns me."
5. Fear the clusterfug.
The terrible trio of illusion, impatience, and incompetence are ever-present risks. Healthy doses of worry and self-doubt are antidotes to these three hallmarks of scaling clusterfugs.
6. Scaling requires both addition and subtraction.
The problem of more is also a problem of less.
7. Slow down to scale faster--and better--down the road.
Learn when and how to shift gears from automatic, mindless, and fast modes of thinking ("System 1") to slow, taxing, logical, deliberative, and conscious modes ("System 2"); sometimes the best advice is, "Don't just do something, stand there."
