Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. This book is a wonderful, insightful read for today’s world. Robert Sutton continues to provide deep analysis for successful leaders. Those leaders in turn generate (and sustain) ideal performers. Coronavirus is challenging business to fundamentally re-think their core business model.
Scaling Up Excellence will help organizations understand how to embrace change faster and effectively in the short term. And short term as of mid April may be forecasting this into December 2020.
Let me begin with a new twist for business projects. Conduct a pre-mortem. Organizations conduct post mortems to discover where tasks failed. Sutton’s pre-mortem can drive project goals or reveal scope creep.
The key is dividing your team into two. One team will imagine project delivery as a success specifically down to the details. The second team takes the opposite road, also in great detail. Bring your teams back together and place all points on a whiteboard. Find your hits and misses in a new way and determine if your scope is accurate enough to deliver.
Scaling Up Excellence provides great case studies and academic research. From start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, education, non-profits, and healthcare. All benefit from pre-mortems.
Scaling Up Excellence identify key scaling challenges that can confuse almost every organization. Sutton and Rao address the hard choices organizations must make to succeed. Nurturing new ideas at the local level, or replicate the long accepted practices?
This is hi-lighted in chapter 2 Buddhism versus Catholicism: Choosing a Path:
At the “Catholic” end, where common practices are replicated with little deviation, it is hard to quarrel with the success of In-N-Out Burger and See’s Candies. These beloved U.S. chains shun local customization. The product mix, employee uniforms, training, and procedures (and just about everything else) in each In-N-Out or See’s store are faithful replications.
Or consider Intel’s Copy Exactly! philosophy, first implemented by the semiconductor giant in the 1970s: “Stated in its simplest form, everything which might affect the process, or how it is run, is to be copied down to the finest detail, unless it is either physically impossible to do so, or there is an overwhelming competitive benefit to introducing a change.”
After Copy Exactly! became routine at Intel, yield rates and quality improved dramatically in both existing and new plants. This philosophy works because the manufacturing system is so exact and consistent. It enabled Intel to quickly spot and learn from any unexpected sources of variance. A salesperson for an Intel vendor once told us about a chip-making machine that produced unexpectedly higher yield rates at one plant.
Upon closer investigation, Intel discovered that the vendor had accidentally installed the machine a tad off-center (by ¼ inch) at this particular plant. Intel copied the exact position of this machine in its other twenty or so plants—and yield rates improved across the board.
Stutton and Rao share how Buddhism proves a different philosophy is required in order to find success:
The replica trap can plague companies too. Just ask Home Depot’s leaders. “You can do it, we can help” was the slogan for the twelve Chinese Home Depot stores opened in 2006. This “do it yourself” (DIY) approach works in America, but it clashes with the “do it for me” (DIFM) mindset in China.
Most people in China do not have the space or tools to do home improvements and aren’t raised with the DIY mindset. Labor is also a lot cheaper in China, so customers who can afford to shop at Home Depot can usually afford to pay someone to do their projects.
Home Depot’s DIY approach flopped: the last Beijing store closed in 2011, and the remaining seven stores were closed by late 2012. China experts—and even a Home Depot spokesperson—chalked up the failure to the company’s rigidity and ignorance of the market. The University of Florida’s Steven Kirn explained that being in tune with the local culture is essential: “You can’t just parachute in.” In contrast, Yum! is thriving in China, with over four thousand KFCs and Pizza Huts, because it is “the ultimate example of a company that does adapt its strategy to China.” For example, KFC sells “egg tarts, soy milk, and other items that aren’t offered on menus outside of China.”
Pages 83-84
Just a tip of the insights from Scaling Up Excellence.
McKinsey & Company: Scaling up excellence: An interview with Bob Sutton
ChurchillClub: Scaling Up Excellence: Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao and John Lilly
PARC Forum: Scaling Up Excellence
Stanford Graduate School of Business Scaling Up Excellence