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1-Page Summary of Scaling Up Excellence

Overview

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek explores how the brain and body work together to control people’s behavior. It also explains how our bodies are designed differently than they were originally supposed to be, and why we need true leaders to guide us back on track.

Why is it that some stores in a city are more popular than others? Why do some research units at universities top the league tables and not others? Why does your favorite football team play better than its neighboring rival?

If you’ve ever wondered how to replicate something great in another place, this is the book for you. It’ll teach you how to bring the good stuff from one place and spread it around.

In Scaling Up Excellence, Sutton and Rao explain the challenges of spreading excellent practices. The book is packed with research and examples that give you practical advice on how to scale up excellence in your organization.

In this book, you will find out why military knowledge is essential for spreading best practices. You’ll learn how to scale up a business by understanding the Catholic Church and Buddhism. You’ll also discover that disruptive employees can outperform everyone else in an organization. Finally, you’ll see how watermelons saved students’ lives at a university.

Big Idea #1: Scaling is essential to the success of organizations.

Scaling is a major challenge for leaders in successful companies. Scaling means that the excellent performance of some part of the company will be spread to other departments and locations. This is called scaling because it’s “the problem of more.” However, each different organization has its own way to scale. For instance, scaling can mean growing from twenty employees to forty or opening a new burger store in another country.

Scaling requires replicating best practices, but also improving performance. It means innovating and adapting strategies for better delivery of your product or service.

Take the Bridgewater International Academies. They started with one school in 2009 and now have over 210 schools worldwide. During their growth process, they not only focused on expanding but also improving their practices.

For example, they’re working on a new program that provides teachers with custom made content to help students who have different abilities. Scaling is a difficult process and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for it. But we can learn some key principles from successful examples of scaling that will be useful in the future.

Big Idea #2: It is more important to be persistent than it is to achieve quick wins.

Before you can scale excellent behavior in your firm, it is necessary to first understand the challenges that will arise when scaling. The process of scaling requires a lot of effort and hard work before one feels satisfied with their progress.

When you’re trying to improve your organization’s performance, it’s important to be able to overcome obstacles. If you set out like an air war (quick and safe), but don’t make the necessary investments, you’ll never defeat your opponents. Therefore, when scaling a business or organization, it’s important not only to think about how quickly you can advance your goals without making any sacrifices along the way—but also how much time and effort it will take in order for those goals to be reached.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg made sure that every employee at Facebook was committed to the company’s values and vision. He even had a six-week program where new employees needed to prove themselves in different teams and work with mentors.

Facebook invests a lot of time and effort into training new employees, so that they can improve their performance.