1장
When Excellence Takes Flight: Spreading Greatness Beyond the Few
What do a luxury hotel chain, a tech giant, and a healthcare initiative have in common? They've all mastered the art of scaling excellence-transforming pockets of greatness into organization-wide brilliance. "Scaling Up Excellence" by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao has become a business bible for leaders facing the challenge of spreading constructive beliefs and behaviors. The book has earned praise from industry titans like Netflix's Reed Hastings and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, who calls it "the best book I've read on effectively scaling an organization." Through seven years of research across diverse organizations, the authors discovered that scaling isn't just about getting bigger-it's about getting better. Their insights have transformed how companies from Google to Starbucks approach growth, making this work particularly relevant in today's rapidly scaling startup ecosystem.
2장
The Ground War: Why Scaling Requires Grit and Persistence
Scaling excellence isn't an air war won through inspirational speeches and PowerPoint presentations. It's a ground war requiring persistent effort to change beliefs and behaviors one person at a time. This insight emerged repeatedly across organizations of all types and sizes, from Silicon Valley startups to global corporations, and proves especially critical during periods of rapid growth.
Consider Claudia Kotchka's seven-year journey scaling innovation practices at Procter & Gamble. Though naturally impatient, she learned from CEO A.G. Lafley that scaling required patience and persistence. She implemented a comprehensive innovation training program, established innovation centers across global locations, and personally mentored dozens of innovation leaders. As one McKinsey consultant aptly put it, successful scaling means "moving a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet."
This ground war mindset proves equally vital in young organizations. Bridge International Academies in Kenya developed a rigorous teacher selection process-interviewing 10,000 candidates, testing multiple skills including content knowledge, classroom management, and cultural fit, and conducting a five-week training camp before selecting the best 800. Their commitment to excellence wasn't just about maintaining standards but continuously improving them. They collected detailed performance data, refined teaching methods based on outcomes, and created feedback loops that enabled continuous improvement across their network of schools.
Even bottom-up scaling requires similar determination. Andy Papa transformed NASCAR pit crews by bringing an "athletic mindset" to their work. He introduced revolutionary changes: morning strength training sessions, detailed performance metrics for each crew member, weekly film analysis sessions, and technique refinement through repetitive practice. Through these methods, he helped Hendrick Motorsports achieve unprecedented championship success, reducing pit stop times from 16 seconds to under 13 seconds. What connects scaling stars like Kotchka, May, and Papa is grit-the capacity to maintain effort despite setbacks, approaching achievement as a marathon rather than a sprint.
Facebook exemplifies how to instill a mindset while experiencing explosive growth. From Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room to a billion users in eight years, they maintained core beliefs by slowing down where it mattered-developing people. Their "Bootcamp" program delays job placement for new engineers for six weeks, allowing them to work across different groups, tackle real problems, and make meaningful contributions to the codebase. This process primarily serves to infect newcomers with Facebook's sacred belief: "Move fast and break things." Engineers don't just hear they can change code; they experience it firsthand, making commits to production code within their first week.
Scaling excellence requires vigilance against complacency. When organizations prioritize rapid expansion over quality, their mindset deteriorates. Starbucks exemplifies this danger-as they expanded from 1,000 to 13,000 stores, their commitment to excellent products and people waned. The company began focusing on efficiency metrics over customer experience, automated espresso machines replaced manual ones, and training programs were shortened. As Howard Schultz acknowledged, the "commoditization of the Starbucks experience" happened through seemingly innocent decisions that gradually eroded their sacred convictions. This led to his return as CEO in 2008 and a massive effort to retrain baristas and restore the company's core values.
3장
Mindsets That Scale: Embedding Values Through Sensory Experience
Excellence rarely vanishes all at once-it erodes gradually through seemingly insignificant decisions that chip away at sacred convictions. Successful scaling requires engaging all five senses to embed the desired mindset deeply into organizational culture, creating an immersive environment that consistently reinforces core values.
Research demonstrates how powerfully environmental stimuli influence human behavior, often in subtle but measurable ways. In a notable study, French music playing in a supermarket led to five times more French wine purchases, while German music boosted German wine sales. Citrus scents in train cars reduced littering threefold, demonstrating how unconscious sensory cues shape behavior. Even brief exposure to money-whether handling fake bills, viewing images of currency, or being exposed to money-related words-makes people measurably less helpful and more likely to maintain physical distance from others.
Disney stands as a master class in multisensory organizational culture, deliberately engineering every aspect of the guest experience to spread happiness. They pipe specific vanilla scents through Main Street USA, carefully select color palettes to evoke specific emotions, and maintain strict behavioral guidelines like having cast members kneel when talking to children to maintain eye level contact. Most importantly, Disney vigilantly removes any "dissonant details" that might undermine their carefully crafted mindset-Mickey Mouse never talks on cell phones, Snow White never chews gum, and cast members never break character, even briefly.
The psychological challenge of balancing short-term execution with long-term vision presents a constant tension in scaling organizations. Cognitive research reveals that focusing on distant future events helps leaders prioritize long-term strategic goals but can also generate unrealistic fantasies that ignore necessary intermediate steps. Conversely, focusing solely on immediate deadlines helps identify feasible actions but risks losing sight of ultimate objectives and broader mission.
Successful scaling requires constantly connecting present actions to future aspirations through both systems and culture. Shannon May, co-founder of Bridge International Academies, exemplified this when she insisted her team communicate via cell phones even in their first Nairobi school, consistently asking "if it would work with one hundred schools." This future-oriented thinking influenced everything from their technology choices to staff training protocols. Similarly, Google's then-SVP of Business Operations Shona Brown described how leaders systematically resisted doing what was easiest in the moment, instead challenging teams to consider "How will this work when we are ten times or a hundred times bigger?"
This scaling mindset profoundly influenced Google's notoriously selective hiring process. Despite creating short-term pain through heavier workloads for existing staff and delayed product releases, Google's discipline in finding people who could grow with the company preserved its innovative essence as it scaled from 1,000 to 30,000 employees. They maintained rigorous hiring standards including multiple interviews, committee reviews, and culture-fit assessments, recognizing that compromising on talent quality for short-term gains would create long-term cultural decay.
4장
Accountability: Creating Ownership at Every Level
Accountability means creating an organization where everyone feels responsible for embodying excellence, even when tired or distracted. The goal is designing a system where this pressure is constant and underperformers have nowhere to hide. This requires both structural elements and cultural reinforcement to create an environment of mutual responsibility and transparent performance.
Michael Bloomberg created such accountability as New York City mayor by placing himself and 51 key staff members in a "bullpen"-a small room with low partitions where everyone could see and hear each other's work. When staff saw the mayor conducting high-level meetings in plain view, they understood that "this open-communication model is not bullshit. And that it works." This physical arrangement fostered immediate feedback, quick decision-making, and eliminated the traditional hierarchical barriers that often slow government operations. The bullpen became a symbol of Bloomberg's management style, demonstrating that leadership should be visible and accessible.
Physical proximity isn't the only way to create accountability. Stanford professors Chuck Eesley and Amin Saberi scaled an entrepreneurship course from 60 students to 37,000 worldwide through their Venture Lab platform. Rather than just broadcasting content, they built social features that created peer accountability. They recognized that in online education, the challenge wasn't content delivery but maintaining engagement and quality standards at scale.
Students formed groups and evaluated peers with ratings visible to everyone. The platform enabled peer-reviewed homework, which resulted in tougher grading standards than faculty assessments. Social pressure and transparency drove down enrollment from 37,000 to 10,000 as free riders dropped out. This natural selection process ensured that remaining students were truly committed to learning. By fall 2013, at least 55 courses were using this platform, which became the company NovoEd under Saberi's leadership. The success demonstrated how properly designed accountability systems can actually improve quality while scaling.
A "clusterfug" represents the worst-case scenario in scaling-a catastrophic collision of illusion, impatience, and incompetence. Decision makers believe what they're scaling is better and easier to spread than reality warrants, rush implementation before proper preparation, and lack the requisite knowledge and skill for successful execution. These situations often arise when leaders prioritize speed over readiness and ignore warning signs from front-line staff.
Stanford University's 2003 IT upgrade illustrates this perfectly. Leaders abandoned their legacy system for Oracle Financials, deluding themselves into a "big bang" implementation despite the system being unfinished and users inadequately trained. They even distributed stress-relief punching bags to staff before launch, signaling their awareness of impending problems while proceeding anyway. This decision reflected a dangerous combination of overconfidence and willful ignorance of obvious risks.
The rollout was disastrous. By December 2003, over 500 unresolved help requests overwhelmed IT staff. Administrative processes took 2-3 times longer than before, with missing and flawed data making money management "difficult, if not impossible." The CIO admitted staff morale had plummeted, with employees feeling "completely disarmed, embarrassed, and ashamed" at their inability to perform basic functions. This case became a cautionary tale in change management, demonstrating how lack of proper accountability structures can lead to systemic failure when scaling complex systems.
5장
Buddhism vs. Catholicism: Finding the Right Balance
When scaling excellence, leaders face a fundamental choice between replicating practices exactly (Catholicism) or allowing adaptation to local conditions (Buddhism). This tension emerged during early discussions at Stanford's d.school about spreading design thinking.
Evidence supports both approaches. At the "Catholic" end, companies like In-N-Out Burger, See's Candies, and Intel with its "Copy Exactly!" philosophy have succeeded through faithful replication. Intel's approach improved yield rates dramatically by ensuring manufacturing systems remained precisely consistent across plants-even copying a machine's accidental off-center installation when it improved performance.
Yet rigid replication can lead to failure. Home Depot's American "do-it-yourself" approach flopped in China, where customers prefer "do-it-for-me" services. Meanwhile, Yum! thrived by adapting KFC and Pizza Hut to local tastes with items like egg tarts and soy milk.
The most successful organizations often strike a balance using what the authors call a "Lego brick" approach-replicating certain essential elements while allowing others to vary. Apple enforces secrecy across all levels while McDonald's standardizes french fries globally but varies menus by country. Even the Four Seasons, which prides itself on being "Italian in Italy, French in France," maintains 270 "service culture standards" across all properties while flexing implementation to fit local contexts.
Sometimes the need for local customization is obvious. IKEA faced challenges in China similar to Home Depot's failures. Beyond the "do-it-for-me" culture, many Chinese don't own cars to transport bulky furniture. IKEA adapted by offering smaller products (like smaller beds), adding Chinese foods to cafeterias, increasing staffing for the crowds who treat stores as tourist attractions, and building stores near public transportation with local delivery options.
IKEA also nudges Chinese consumers toward change, showing through advertising that "change can be easy" and "step-by-step." This two-pronged strategy works-their eleven mainland China stores saw sales up 21% in 2012.
The Home Depot/IKEA contrast shows adaptation is essential, but beware of "delusions of uniqueness" that foster misguided Buddhism. Dr. Atul Gawande illustrates this in healthcare, where standardization like the Cheesecake Factory's approach to restaurant management could improve outcomes. His colleague Dr. Wright battled to standardize knee replacements at Brigham and Women's Hospital, reducing costs by half and improving recovery times, despite resistance from surgeons who saw themselves as "special."
6장
Hot Causes, Cool Solutions: Creating Emotional Energy for Change
To scale effectively, leaders must create emotional energy that propels change-"hot causes"-while providing practical ways to implement them-"cool solutions." This principle emerged vividly in a Stanford graduate course on scaling excellence, where students tackled increasing bike helmet use on campus.
Despite helmets reducing serious head injury risk by 85%, fewer than 10% of Stanford undergraduates wore them. Many students abandoned helmets upon arriving at Stanford due to peer pressure. The class witnessed this mindset shift when they invited accident survivor Kali Lindsay to share her story. After being teased as "helmet girl," she stopped wearing her helmet and subsequently suffered a serious brain injury. Her emotional testimony moved many students to immediately adopt helmets.
This illustrates the power of "hot causes"-stories and symbols that trigger attention, emotional energy, and commitment. The question for scaling any change is whether to start by changing beliefs or behaviors-the "B2B choice." While 19th-century thinkers debated whether thoughts drive actions or actions create thoughts, research suggests the most effective approach is targeting both simultaneously, creating a virtuous circle.
The student team tasked with increasing helmet use among Stanford's men's soccer team discovered this difference. Initially, they recited safety statistics, which had absolutely no impact. After brainstorming more compelling approaches, they created "The Watermelon Offensive"-a vivid campaign using smashed watermelons as a metaphor for cracked skulls. They scattered broken melons around the practice field, displayed posters of unconscious students with smashed melons by their heads, and attached waterproof versions to each player's bike handlebars.
The team gathered the soccer players, shared laughs while smashing more watermelons, and branded their campaign "Love Your Lobes." They concluded by sharing Kali's emotional story and connecting it to the safety statistics that had previously fallen flat.
To link these emotions to action, they had players sign pledges to wear helmets, post photos of themselves wearing helmets on Facebook, and promise to "throw a watermelon" at teammates caught without helmets. The group even provided watermelons for this accountability mechanism. The public commitments and peer pressure worked-every team member wore helmets, even the most resistant ones, and the practice spread to women's field hockey and soccer teams.
7장
Reducing Cognitive Load: Making Excellence Easier
Scaling excellence inevitably requires adding new rules, processes, technologies, and people. But these additions can stretch people and systems to the breaking point through cognitive overload. When working memory is overwhelmed, blind spots emerge, decisions suffer, and willpower depletes.
Research on multitasking reveals that despite claims younger people are more adept at juggling tasks, studies show multitasking undermines everyone's competence. Stanford's Cliff Nass found "heavy multitaskers" performed worse than "light multitaskers" on every task examined-they were even worse at multitasking itself, concluding "They're suckers for irrelevancy... Everything distracts them."
While adding people can help share cognitive load, this solution carries its own problems. As teams grow larger, individual performance suffers. Bradley Staats found that while four-person teams assembled Lego figures faster than two-person teams, they were less efficient, requiring 112 "person-minutes" versus 72 minutes for smaller teams.
Jennifer Mueller's study of innovation teams revealed that the bigger the team, the worse each member performed. Group effectiveness expert J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six people is optimal: "No work team should have membership in the double digits... performance problems increase exponentially as team size increases."
This explains why Intuit follows the "Two-Pizza Rule" (teams no larger than can be fed by two pizzas) and why Pulse News divided their eight-person company into three teams to reduce arguments and increase productivity. Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar calculated that humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships before communication demands outstrip cognitive capacity-a limit that explains why military companies traditionally max out at 150 soldiers.
Well-designed hierarchies can enhance collective effectiveness by clarifying decision-making authority and establishing order. Google's Larry Page learned this when he eliminated all middle managers in 2001, creating chaos among 400 employees until he restored necessary hierarchy.
At Salesforce.com, Chris Fry and Steve Greene used the motto "The job of the hierarchy is to defeat the hierarchy" while scaling their software development organization from 40 to 600 people. They noticed development was slowing down as the organization grew. Their solution was creating smaller teams with higher accountability, requiring monthly software demos and company-wide releases every four months. They also implemented an open internal job market where engineers could switch teams without permission, encouraging leaders to develop good reputations and treat people well.
8장
The People Factor: Talent and Accountability
Scaling requires both talent and accountability-like heart and brain, both are essential. Organizations need people with the right skills who also feel compelled to act in the organization's best interests and hold others accountable. Without both elements, excellence cannot survive, as demonstrated by the demoralized United Airlines pilot who had given up trying to improve his workplace. The key is building organizations where employees feel "I own the place and the place owns me"-creating mutual obligation that drives exceptional performance.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings builds "talent density" by hiring only star performers and quickly firing those who deliver merely adequate results. The company pays top-of-market salaries and adjusts compensation regularly to stay competitive without employees needing outside offers. With this roster of stars, Netflix needs fewer rules and managers-their entire policy on expenses is simply "Act in Netflix's best interests." This approach creates a virtuous cycle where autonomy and minimal friction attract talented people who work intensely.
Unlike Netflix's superstar approach, Japanese lunch delivery company Tamago-Ya succeeds by developing promising but imperfect people. They employ high school dropouts, some with criminal histories, as delivery drivers who own their routes and earn up to $80,000 annually. These drivers interview and select their own customers, rejecting those in difficult-to-reach locations. They gather market intelligence during lunch container collection, helping forecast the next day's orders. Despite serving 60,000-75,000 lunches daily with a 60-90 minute delivery window, they maintain a remarkable 0.006% failure rate without sophisticated technology.
Merely hiring talented people isn't sufficient for scaling excellence. Organizations often mistakenly believe that accumulating skilled individuals will automatically produce exceptional results, forgetting that success requires weaving diverse talents together effectively. Research by Boris Groysberg shows that stars often aren't portable-when top stock analysts changed firms, their performance dropped by 20% and hadn't recovered even five years later. Their arrival also demoralized insiders, damaged team dynamics, and even caused stock prices to fall.
Collective pride and aggression toward outsiders effectively counteract free-riding tendencies. These emotions direct people's focus beyond themselves, bind team members together, and spread contagiously. When surrounded by proud colleagues who share righteous indignation against obstacles, people worry less about selfish concerns and willingly take difficult actions for collective benefit. Netflix fosters this by treating the company like a sports team rather than a family, emphasizing winning against competitors.
9장
Bad Is Stronger Than Good: Eliminating Destructive Behaviors
To scale effectively, leaders must eliminate the negative as much as amplify the positive. Disney exemplifies this principle through their obsession with eliminating "dissonant details"-from keeping parks spotless to quickly addressing guest distress through "aggressively friendly" interventions.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister's research confirms that "bad is stronger than good"-negative emotions, events, and feedback have more impact and staying power than positive ones. In marriage, the absence of negative interactions predicts success better than the presence of positive ones, leading to the five-to-one rule: positive interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for relationships to succeed.
In organizations, negative interactions with bosses and coworkers have five times greater impact on employee moods than positive ones. A single "bad apple" can drop team performance by 30-40% by diverting time and emotional energy. Bad behaviors are also highly contagious-research on college cheating shows that being encouraged to cheat by just one student increases the odds of encouraging others to cheat by thirty-two times.
When people see themselves as bystanders rather than accountable participants, they fail to act even when they know what's right. The tragic death of Esmin Green at Kings County Hospital-where she lay on the floor for an hour while staff and patients ignored her-exemplifies this problem.
Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane's classic "bystander effect" studies revealed three key factors that prevent intervention. First is ambiguity-witnesses are often unsure if a situation warrants action. Second is "diffusion of responsibility"-the assumption that someone else will help. Third is fear of disapproval from other witnesses.
Disney counters these tendencies by making it every employee's job to help guests in need and pick up trash, regardless of their official role. Similarly, research on schoolyard bullying shows that while many students privately disapprove of bullying, they don't intervene because they fear peer rejection and question their judgment when others remain passive.
The "broken windows" theory suggests that allowing even minor bad behavior signals that no one cares, leading to worse misconduct. When NYC Police Chief William Bratton cracked down on minor offenses like fare evasion and public drinking, more serious crimes declined. Research confirms this approach works. Cialdini's studies showed people rarely litter in clean areas but readily do so where litter already exists.
