How to scale up excellence
In Scaling Up Excellence, Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: scaling up farther, faster and more effectively as a program or an organization creates a larger footprint.
Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the past decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries, Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization.
They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between encouraging individualized approaches tailored to local needs or replicating the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread and instill the right mindsets in their people – rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.
Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge.
Robert Sutton is professor of management science and engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. His previous books include Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the Best...and Learn from the Worst, and The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.
Huggy Rao is professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations.
