Notes on Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao

A friend of mine gifted me the book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao, and I finally finished reading it. (It took me a while because it was in Apple Books, and I only read those on my phone when I have a spare few minutes here and there, as opposed to audio books on Audible that I read much more consistently and for more time each week.)

I had read other books by Bob Sutton before (whose classes I remember taking at Stanford) and have generally enjoyed his work. This book featured lots of stories and in-depth examples from various industries of all sorts of scaling and quality improvement efforts (tech startups, hospitals, non-profits, etc.). Those examples were really interesting. It was fun for me to see the real names because I actually met many of them myself in a d.school bootcamp I attended a few years ago, so it was interesting to hear how some of their stories evolved and ended up.

Below are some of my notes/takeaways/favorite excerpts.

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• "​uncover pockets of exemplary performance"
• "Scaling well hinges on making the right trade-offs between mandating that new people and places become perfect clones of some original model (a “Catholic” approach) versus encouraging local variation, experimentation, and customization (a “Buddhist” approach)"
• "organizations that spread and sustain excellence are infused with a “relentless restlessness”—that often uncomfortable urge for constant innovation, driven by the nagging feeling that things are never quite good enough"
• "When big organizations scale well, they focus on “moving a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet.”"
• "Scaling is analogous to a ground war rather than an air war because developing, spreading, and updating a mindset requires relentless vigilance"
• "SCALING MANTRAS 1. Spread a mindset, not just a footprint. Running up the numbers and putting your logo on as many people and places as possible isn’t enough. 2. Engage all the senses. Bolster the mindset you want to spread with supportive sights, sounds, smells, and other subtle cues that people may barely notice, if at all. 3. Link short-term realities to long-term dreams. Hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later. 4. Accelerate accountability. Build in the feeling that “I own the place and the place owns me.” 5. Fear the clusterfug. The terrible trio of illusion, impatience, and incompetence are ever-present risks. Healthy doses of worry and self-doubt are antidotes to these three hallmarks of scaling clusterfugs. 6. Scaling requires both addition and subtraction. The problem of more is also a problem of less. 7. Slow down to scale faster—and better—down the road. Learn when and how to shift gears from automatic, mindless, and fast modes of thinking (“System 1”) to slow, taxing, logical, deliberative, and conscious modes (“System 2”); sometimes the best advice is, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”"
• "we advocate “the Goldilocks Theory of Bureaucracy.” Much like the children’s story, scaling requires injecting just enough structure, hierarchy, and process at the right time. The key challenge, then, is knowing when to add more complexity, when it is “just right,” and when to wait a bit longer"