Scaling up Excellence
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  • Published: 6 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9781448149827
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Scaling up Excellence

Formats & editions
EBook
6 Feb 2014
Audiobook
24 Dec 2015
Paperback
31 Oct 2016
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How do you create a great organisation? By scaling up excellence.

Scaling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It’s how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It’s how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it’s how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn’t know how to scale up what is best within it won’t achieve long-term success.

Bestselling author Robert Sutton and his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao have devoted nearly a decade to uncovering what it takes to create and spread outstanding performance, and in Scaling Up Excellence they share the fruits of their research. Drawing on case studies that range from Silicon Valley enterprises to non-profit organisations, they provide crucial insights into corporate cultures, both good and bad, and offer a road map for establishing and stimulating excellence. In the process, they show how to use ‘premortems’ when making big decisions about change. They reveal why seven is so often the magic number when it comes to team size. They examine successful and unsuccessful quests for improvement – in hospitals, schools and elsewhere. And they discuss when a single corporate mindset is best (‘Catholicism’) and when local variation is preferable (‘Buddhism’).

Scaling Up Excellence is the first management book devoted to what is – or should be – a core priority for every organisation. As such it is destined to become the standard bearer.
  • Published: 6 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9781448149827
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368
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About the authors

Robert I. Sutton

Robert I. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School.He is co-founder of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, which he co-directed from 1996 to 2006.Sutton is also co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the new Hasso Planter Institute of Design, a multi-disciplinary program at Stanford that teaches and spreads “design thinking.”He is an IDEO Fellow, member of the Institute for the Future’s Board Trustees, and a Professor of Organizational Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

portrait photo of Robert I. Sutton

Hayagreeva Rao

Hayagreeva Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Morgan Stanley Director for the Center for Leadership Development and Research at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Rao is a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association and the Academy of Management. He was the editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly, the most prestigious peer reviewed organizational theory journal. He also has served as Consulting Editor for American Journal of Sociology, Senior Editor of Organizational Science, and Guest Editor of Academy of Management Review. He will be on the editorial board of American Sociological Review.

portrait photo of Hayagreeva Rao

Praise for Scaling up Excellence

This insightful book shares the methods and strategies that successful leaders rely on to spread the beliefs and behaviors that can accelerate an organization's growth while simultaneously improving its processes.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder/Chairman of LinkedIn and co-author of the bestselling The Start-up of You

Innovation at scale and speed is our goal. Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao show us how to do it more often and better, knowing that scale matters.

Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Office, General Electric

Maintaining excellence while growing is full of pitfalls and pain … Scaling Up Excellence gives us a well-crafted framework for thinking about and addressing the nitty-gritty problems on the ground without getting derailed by lofty goals.

Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation Studios

An important book for corporations and entrepreneurs alike.

Eric Ries, author of the bestselling The Lean Startup

A great read that provides real, practical advice whether you're a team of 5 or 50,000. Sutton and Rao find just the right stories to show how almost any team can get bigger and better.

Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations, Google

They do not shy away from the messiness and difficulties of the task of expanding an organisation. Stanford professors Huggy Rao and Robert Sutton point out that too many growth plans are launched with fanfare by grandstanding chief executives who then turn out not to have the "grit required for a prolonged ground war".

Financial Times

The pair’s eagerness drips from every page and it would be a hard-hearted reader who left Scaling Up Excellence anything less than thoroughly energised about the potential for positive change... Very good indeed.

Robert Jeffery, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Practical and spiced with entertaining case studies. They do not shy away, either, from pointing out that it may sometimes make sense to stay small.

Financial Times

Explains how a brilliant idea or plan developed by a few people can be effectively adopted by the whole workforce.

Director