Scaling Up Excellence

Whether it’s a matter of disseminating lean manufacturing practices to all plants, opening new branches, or proliferating best customer orientation practices, business leaders often run into the same questions. How do you effectively transfer pockets of excellence to more employees and more facilities? How can you grow without diluting the model and improve while institutionalizing benchmark practices in the organization? In this excellent book, Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, two eminent Stanford University professors, tackle this problem head on. Chapter after chapter, they raise the issues facing leaders. How much room should you leave for local adaptation of the model? What approach should you adopt to deploy new practices most effectively? How do you find good change agents? Etc. They provide concrete advice firmly supported by research findings and company case studies. Chapter 1, in particular, emphasizes the fact that the broad dissemination of best practices is a war that is won patiently, in the field, not by bombarding people with new directives from headquarters—no matter how relevant and well-supported they are. Chapters 4 and 6 point out two essential rules for this kind of project. First of all, remember to simplify when adding new procedures or practices. Otherwise, the project may well sow confusion and complexity rather than serve as a breath of fresh air. In addition, isolated project teams will naturally have trouble influencing the actions and beliefs of thousands of employees and dozens of facilities. Without an effective relay strategy, their impact is likely to remain extremely limited. A book to read and re-read without moderation!