Scaling Up Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence Plot Summary

Introduction

How do organizations successfully spread excellence from pockets of brilliance to the entire system? This fundamental challenge confronts leaders in every sector, from startups scaling their initial success to established companies expanding geographically or transforming their operations. The difficulty lies not merely in knowing what excellence looks like, but in creating the conditions for it to spread and sustain across an organization while preserving its essence. The theory of scaling excellence presented here offers a structured framework for understanding this complex process. Rather than viewing scaling as simply a matter of growth or replication, it reframes it as the spread of a mindset - a shared way of thinking and acting that embodies the organization's best qualities. This perspective illuminates why so many scaling efforts fail despite good intentions and substantial resources. By examining the tensions between standardization and adaptation, emotional energy and practical implementation, and individual accountability and network connections, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how excellence can be systematically spread from the few to the many.

Chapter 1: Ground War vs. Air War: The Fundamental Scaling Challenge

Scaling excellence requires recognizing the distinction between "air war" and "ground war" approaches. The air war represents broad, high-visibility efforts like inspirational speeches, company-wide emails, and formal announcements that communicate vision and direction. While these create awareness and initial momentum, they rarely produce lasting change on their own. The ground war, by contrast, involves the messy, hands-on work of implementation - the daily interactions, persistent coaching, and personal example-setting that gradually transform how people think and act. Organizations often gravitate toward air war tactics because they seem efficient and dramatic. A CEO can address thousands of employees simultaneously through a company-wide broadcast, creating the illusion of rapid progress. However, research consistently shows that meaningful change happens through what psychologists call "grit" - the perseverance and passion for long-term goals despite obstacles and plateaus. This quality manifests in leaders who engage directly with teams, address resistance personally, and repeatedly reinforce desired behaviors until they become habitual. The ground war approach recognizes that scaling isn't just about expanding footprint but about spreading a particular mindset throughout the organization. When Claudia Kotchka led innovation practices at Procter & Gamble, she discovered that transforming the company required both action orientation and patient persistence - moving "a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet." This methodical approach allowed her to turn a tiny team into a network of over three hundred innovation experts embedded across dozens of businesses. Successful scaling efforts balance both approaches while emphasizing the ground war. Facebook exemplifies this through their "Bootcamp" program, where new engineers spend six weeks rotating through different teams before permanent placement. This immersive experience instills Facebook's core belief of "Move fast and break things" by having newcomers immediately modify code and experience the company's culture firsthand. The program creates a sustainable system for scaling both technical expertise and cultural values through direct experience rather than abstract instruction. Organizations that excel at scaling understand that meaningful change happens through consistent, often unglamorous work that gradually transforms how people think and act. They recognize that while inspirational messages can create initial energy, excellence only spreads when leaders are willing to engage in the daily grind of implementation, addressing resistance, clarifying confusion, and celebrating small wins along the way. The ground war mindset acknowledges that scaling is fundamentally a human process that requires personal connection, persistent effort, and unwavering commitment to the long-term goal.

Chapter 2: Buddhism vs. Catholicism: Balancing Replication and Adaptation

When scaling excellence, organizations face a fundamental choice between what the authors call "Catholic" and "Buddhist" approaches - a spectrum that defines how rigidly or flexibly they replicate their practices. The Catholic approach treats the original model as sacred, requiring precise replication with minimal deviation. In contrast, the Buddhist approach focuses on spreading underlying principles while allowing considerable local adaptation. This distinction represents one of the most crucial decisions in any scaling effort. The Catholic end of the spectrum has produced remarkable successes in certain contexts. Intel's "Copy Exactly!" philosophy, which mandates replicating manufacturing processes down to the finest detail, dramatically improved yield rates and quality across their semiconductor plants. Similarly, fast-food chains like McDonald's and In-N-Out Burger have thrived by ensuring that product mix, employee training, and procedures are faithfully replicated in each location. Research on franchise operations confirms that strict adherence to standardized templates often correlates with higher revenue and lower failure rates, particularly when consistency is crucial to the customer experience. However, rigid replication can lead to what researchers call the "replica trap" - the mistaken belief that identical implementation will produce identical results across different contexts. Home Depot's failure in China illustrates this danger. Their "do it yourself" approach, successful in America, clashed with China's "do it for me" culture where labor is cheaper and DIY skills less common. By contrast, IKEA succeeded in China by maintaining their core concept while adapting to local conditions - offering assembly services, positioning stores near public transportation, and modifying products to suit Chinese homes. This flexibility allowed them to preserve their essence while accommodating crucial cultural differences. Most successful scaling efforts strike a balance between replication and adaptation, much like working with Lego bricks. They identify certain elements - individual bricks and "subassemblies" - that must be replicated precisely, while allowing flexibility elsewhere. Kaiser Permanente demonstrated this balance when implementing their electronic health record system across eight regions. They established five crucial "guardrails" - including system name, interoperability standards, and common data definitions - while allowing considerable regional discretion in implementation. This approach preserved essential consistency while harnessing the motivation and ownership that comes from local customization. The key to navigating this continuum lies in diagnosing when to move toward either end. Organizations should watch for "delusions of uniqueness" that resist proven practices, ensure they have a successful template to use as a prototype, and recognize when Buddhist approaches might generate crucial understanding and innovation. The goal isn't to choose one approach exclusively, but to determine when each serves the scaling effort best - creating a system that maintains essential consistency while allowing for the adaptation that keeps excellence relevant and vibrant across diverse contexts.

Chapter 3: Hot Causes, Cool Solutions: Emotional Fuel for Change

Successful scaling requires both emotional energy and practical tools - what the authors call "hot causes and cool solutions." This dynamic creates a virtuous cycle where beliefs and behaviors reinforce each other, propelling the scaling engine forward. Hot causes provide the emotional fuel that motivates people to embrace change and persevere through challenges, while cool solutions channel that energy into practical, effective action. The process begins by creating what psychologists call "communities of feeling" - shared emotional experiences that motivate collective action and commitment to a cause. Research shows that emotions are contagious, spreading through organizations via both verbal and non-verbal channels. Leaders who effectively harness this emotional contagion can create powerful momentum for change. When a Stanford student project aimed to increase bicycle helmet use among college athletes, statistics failed to motivate the men's soccer team. Instead, they created the "Watermelon Offensive" - scattering smashed watermelons around the practice field as vivid metaphors for cracked skulls. This visceral imagery, combined with the slogan "Love Your Lobes," triggered strong emotional responses that statistics alone couldn't achieve. While emotional energy is essential, it must be paired with practical "cool solutions" that channel that energy productively. Cool solutions provide the structure and guidance people need to translate their motivation into effective action. They answer the crucial question: "What exactly should I do differently tomorrow morning?" The Stanford students channeled the emotional impact of their watermelon demonstration into concrete action by having players sign public pledges to wear helmets and creating social accountability mechanisms. This combination of emotional appeal and practical guidance transformed behavior, with every team member adopting helmets despite initial resistance. Organizations can employ several strategies to stoke this virtuous circle. "Naming the problem" creates a compact summary that focuses attention and guides action, as when the Institute for Health Improvement framed preventable hospital errors as "needless deaths" - creating moral imperative for change. "Naming the enemy" adds team spirit and righteous anger, exemplified by Steve Jobs rallying Apple employees against competitors like IBM and Microsoft. "Breaching assumptions" reveals unwritten social rules, as when IDEO CEO Tim Brown moved from his private office to sit in the center of the workspace, reinforcing the company's collaborative mindset. The art of scaling excellence requires knowing when to create tight connections between "poetry" (inspiring words and stories) and "plumbing" (practical implementation details), versus when to flex beliefs to fit circumstances. JetBlue Airways demonstrated this balance after a disastrous ice storm stranded passengers for hours in 2007. Rather than dwelling on the crisis, mid-level executive Bonny Simi assembled a diverse team to improve the airline's response to weather disruptions. By focusing on mapping out specific processes and addressing over a thousand identified pain points, the team shifted from a "heroic individual" mindset to a "systems thinking" approach. When another severe ice storm hit in 2010, JetBlue recovered in just one day instead of six, reducing costs from $41 million to $500,000. The most successful scaling efforts maintain both hot causes and cool solutions, recognizing that people need both hearts and minds engaged to sustain excellence over time. Without emotional connection, even the most logical solutions fail to gain traction; without practical guidance, even the most passionate commitment dissipates without impact. Together, they create the conditions for excellence to spread and sustain throughout an organization.

Chapter 4: Reducing Cognitive Load: Simplifying While Managing Complexity

As organizations scale, they inevitably add rules, processes, technologies, and people - creating cognitive burdens that can overwhelm even the most talented individuals. This "cognitive overload" has well-documented negative effects: when mental resources are taxed, people make poorer decisions, ignore their best intentions, and lose willpower. A revealing experiment by marketing researcher Baba Shiv found that students trying to remember seven digits were 50% more likely to choose cake over fruit salad compared to those remembering just two digits - the mental effort required to remember those extra five digits depleted their self-control. This cognitive burden intensifies as organizations grow. Research by Bradley Staats showed that while four-person teams assembled Lego figures faster than two-person teams, they required 56% more total person-minutes due to coordination challenges. Similarly, anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research suggests humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful social relationships before cognitive limits are reached - explaining why military companies historically average around 150 members despite vastly improved communication technologies. These findings highlight a fundamental scaling challenge: as organizations add people and complexity, the cognitive costs of coordination can outweigh the benefits of additional resources. Organizations often respond to growth by adding layers, forming teams, and creating rules that accelerate what venture capitalist John Greathouse calls "Big Dumb Company disease." This phenomenon diverts resources from core work and creates unnecessary friction. Physicist Geoffrey West found that as companies grow, profits-per-employee shrink because "management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips." Universities exemplify this administrative bloat: between 1976 and 2009, the ratio of non-faculty professionals to faculty members in U.S. universities nearly doubled. To combat these challenges, effective organizations practice strategic subtraction. Apple exemplifies this approach - from Steve Jobs insisting on a one-button mouse (despite engineers arguing for two) to limiting profit-and-loss responsibilities to just one executive. Marketing manager Dan Markovitz eliminated a convoluted vacation request system for his team, telling them "as long as they got their jobs done, I didn't care how many vacation days they took." The result? Vacation days actually decreased as employees focused on responsibility rather than gaming the system. Sometimes organizations must inject complexity temporarily before reaching what the authors call "profound simplicity." Kaaren Hanson's team at Intuit initially created an overly complex model for their "Design for Delight" innovation program, with boxes, arrows, and over 150 words. After a year of implementation, they realized this complexity hindered adoption and replaced it with a drastically simpler model containing just thirteen words highlighting three key methods. This simplification helped the program spread from dozens to thousands of employees. The challenge for scaling organizations is finding the right balance - what Ben Horowitz calls "giving ground grudgingly." Like offensive linemen in football who back up slowly to protect the quarterback, organizations must add complexity gradually and only when necessary. Chris Fry and Steve Greene, who scaled Salesforce.com's engineering organization from forty to six hundred people, recommend "running it a little hot" - adding slightly less structure and process than seems necessary to encourage personal responsibility and bottom-up solutions. This approach creates an organizational "operating system" that is just barely complex enough to function effectively while preserving the cognitive capacity people need to do their best work.

Chapter 5: Building Accountability: Creating Mutual Ownership

Scaling excellence requires both exceptional talent and strong accountability - a combination that creates organizations where people feel "I own the place and the place owns me." This dual focus creates a powerful tug of mutual obligation where employees push themselves and others toward excellence while feeling responsible to meet high standards. Neither talent nor accountability alone is sufficient; both must function together, much like a heart and brain are both essential for life. Organizations take different approaches to achieving this combination. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings focuses on "talent density" - hiring only star performers who are also team players, paying them top-of-market salaries, and promptly removing those who deliver merely adequate performance. This approach allows Netflix to operate with minimal rules (their entire expense policy is simply "Act in Netflix's best interests") while maintaining high standards. The company's philosophy resembles a professional sports team, with stars in every position who have considerable autonomy but face exacting expectations. By contrast, Tamago-Ya, a Japanese company producing organic box lunches, takes a development approach. They hire high school dropouts - many with troubled pasts - as delivery drivers and teach them to build relationships with customers. These drivers own their routes, interview and select customers, and earn up to $80,000 annually based on performance. Founder Isatsugu Sugahara, himself a high school dropout, believes this approach creates both skill and accountability - drivers gain knowledge of customer needs while feeling obligated to reciprocate the company's faith in them. Research reveals several strategies for building this talent-accountability combination. First, organizations must squelch "free riding" - the tendency for individuals to contribute less when personal costs outweigh personal benefits. McKinsey, Google, and Procter & Gamble combat this by making promotion contingent on collaboration and contribution to the greater good. Even in resource-constrained environments like Bridge International Academies' schools in Africa, performance-based incentives and swift removal of underperformers prevent the contagion of slacking off. Second, injecting pride and righteous anger can turn attention toward concerns larger than oneself. General Matthew Ridgway demonstrated this when taking command of demoralized U.S. troops during the Korean War. By removing timid leaders, insisting on better intelligence gathering, and personally demonstrating courage under fire, Ridgway restored his soldiers' pride and transformed a retreating army into one that drove Chinese forces back across the 38th parallel within months. The most powerful accountability often comes from creating the right "gene pool" - hiring people predisposed to embrace the organization's mindset. The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai demonstrates this approach by selecting employees from small cities where "the guest is God" - young people from humble families eager to make their families proud. During the 2008 terrorist attack, this accountability mindset led employees to risk their lives protecting guests - not because they saw themselves as heroes, but because putting guests first was simply what they always did. This extraordinary response reflects the ultimate goal of scaling: creating organizations filled with people who have both the skill to do exemplary work and the deep sense of obligation to do what's right.

Chapter 6: Connect and Cascade: Creating Networks of Excellence

Scaling excellence depends fundamentally on connecting people who have expertise with those who need it, creating domino chains where excellence flows from one person or place to the next. This connect-and-cascade process requires both identifying pockets of excellence and establishing pathways for knowledge to flow through organizational networks. When executed well, this process creates self-sustaining chains where each "domino" topples the next without constant intervention from a central team. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 100,000 Lives Campaign exemplifies this approach. A small team led by Joe McCannon identified hospitals with expertise in specific life-saving practices and connected them with facilities needing improvement. Rather than personally managing every relationship, McCannon's team created infrastructure including "nodes" (regional coordinators) and "mentor hospitals" (facilities expert in specific practices) that could spread knowledge independently. This network approach enabled them to reach 3,100 hospitals with just ten full-time staffers, preventing an estimated 122,300 deaths in eighteen months. Effective connection strategies begin with ensuring you actually have excellence to spread. Organizations sometimes attempt to scale practices without evidence they work or before developing true expertise. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals avoided this pitfall when implementing lean manufacturing by first creating "minitransformations" in eight plants - intensive efforts that produced genuine excellence before attempting broader implementation. Similarly, Facebook's Bootcamp program works because it connects new engineers with experienced mentors who truly embody the company's mindset and technical expertise. Diversity plays a crucial role in the connect-and-cascade process. When JetBlue's Bonny Simi assembled her team to improve irregular operations, she included people from throughout the company - baggage handlers, gate agents, pilots, and managers from various locations. This diversity provided expertise on interconnected operations and created pathways to spread the new mindset to more "nodes" in the organization's network. Research on "similarity-attraction" effects explains why this works: people tend to spend more time with others similar to themselves, so a diverse initial team ensures the mindset will cascade to more parts of the organization. The emotional quality of connections also matters. University of Virginia's Rob Cross found that "energizers" - people who leave others feeling enthusiastic and capable - receive more information, learn more, and are more likely to have their ideas implemented than "de-energizers." Facebook's Chris Cox demonstrates this quality, maintaining the company's spirit and mindset from its early days through periods of explosive growth. Organizations can enhance connection through several approaches, including reactivating dormant ties (as the Girl Scouts does with successful alumni), creating game-like experiences that make collaboration fun, and using subtle environmental cues to prime accountability. The key insight is that scaling doesn't succeed until networks are buzzing with constructive actions that reflect and reinforce the excellence you aim to spread - when the organization's "net" truly works. Leaders must constantly ask: "Who has excellence that others need, and how can we connect them?" This network perspective shifts scaling from a top-down implementation challenge to a connection challenge, focusing attention on building the pathways through which excellence naturally flows.

Chapter 7: Breaking Bad Habits: Eliminating Barriers to Excellence

For excellence to spread and thrive, organizations must actively eliminate destructive behaviors that block its path. The authors draw on psychological research showing that "bad is stronger than good" - negative behaviors, emotions, and interactions have a disproportionately powerful impact compared to positive ones. A single toxic employee can reduce team performance by 30-40%, while one instance of rudeness can undermine an otherwise positive customer experience. This asymmetry means that scaling excellence requires not just promoting positive behaviors but actively "breaking bad" - identifying and eliminating negative ones. The "broken windows theory" from criminology provides a useful framework: when small infractions are tolerated, they signal that no one cares, leading to more serious problems. Organizations that nip bad behavior in the bud prevent this downward spiral. Disney trains its staff to be vigilant about "dissonant details" that undermine the guest experience, from litter on the ground to employees who appear disengaged. This attention to seemingly minor details prevents the normalization of mediocrity that can gradually erode excellence. Several strategies help organizations break bad effectively. First, they must make bad behavior unmistakably clear. Ambiguity about what constitutes unacceptable behavior often prevents people from intervening when they witness it. Leaders must explicitly define which behaviors undermine excellence and create systems that make these violations visible. Second, organizations sometimes need to remove persistent bad apples. Research on baboon troops shows that when aggressive alpha males were removed from a troop, a more cooperative culture emerged and persisted even as new members joined. Similarly, school turnaround efforts often begin by replacing a significant portion of staff to reset cultural norms. Third, leaders should focus on fixing "plumbing" before "poetry" - addressing basic operational problems before attempting inspirational change. When Wright Lassiter took over the troubled Alameda Health System, he focused first on practical improvements like reducing costs and fixing parking problems rather than grand visions. This approach built credibility and created a foundation for more ambitious changes. Organizations must also be vigilant about perverse incentives that encourage bad behavior. The Atlanta public school cheating scandal resulted from intense pressure on teachers to improve test scores without adequate support or ethical guardrails. Breaking bad habits requires understanding the psychological and social factors that drive negative behavior. People often engage in destructive actions not because they're inherently malicious, but because organizational systems inadvertently reward such behavior or make positive alternatives difficult. By addressing these underlying factors - removing barriers, aligning incentives, and creating accountability systems - organizations can create environments where excellence naturally flourishes. The most successful scaling efforts recognize that eliminating what doesn't work is often as important as promoting what does.

Summary

The essence of scaling excellence lies not in mechanical replication or rapid expansion, but in spreading a mindset that embodies an organization's best qualities. This perspective transforms scaling from a simple growth challenge into a more nuanced process of cultural transmission, where success depends on balancing seemingly contradictory forces: standardization with adaptation, emotional energy with practical implementation, simplicity with necessary complexity, individual accountability with network connections, and promoting good while eliminating bad. Organizations that master these balancing acts create what the authors call "domino chains of excellence" - self-reinforcing patterns where excellence cascades naturally throughout the network. While the journey is never easy or straightforward, the principles outlined provide a comprehensive framework for navigating the central challenge that all growing organizations face: how to spread excellence from the few to the many while preserving its essence. By focusing on mindsets rather than just footprints, leaders can create organizations where excellence becomes not just a goal but a self-sustaining reality.

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Robert I. Sutton

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