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.
An enjoyable, easy read that further suggests leaderless organizations can fuel dramatic change within organization large and small.