Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less

Chapter 1It's a Ground War, Not Just an Air WarGoing Slower to Scale Faster (and Better) LaterListen. This is the most important thing that we learned, the one to keep in mind every day if you are bent on spreading excellence to more people and places: those who master what venture capitalist Ben Horowitz calls "the black art of scaling a human organization" act as if they are fighting a ground war, not just an air war.In the air wars of World War II, commanders typically ordered pilots to drop bombs or strafe some general area in hopes of damaging the enemy. Unfortunately, such attacks were woefully inaccurate. Political scientist Robert Pape estimated that, during World War II, "only about 18 percent of U.S. bombs fell within 1,000 feet of their targets, and only 20 percent of British bombs dropped at night fell within 5 miles." Even when air strikes were more accurate, Allied leaders learned that without ground operations–where soldiers were close to targets, gaining or losing territory a few yards at a time–victory was impossible. Even today, when guidance systems ensure that 70 percent of bombs fall within thirty feet of targets, an air war alone is rarely enough to defeat an enemy. After reviewing NATO's seventy-eight-day air war in Serbia that was meant to force Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic to ban ethnic cleansing, retired U.S. Air Force General Merrill McPeak concluded, "In a major blunder, the use of ground troops was ruled out from the beginning."Similarly, savvy leaders know that just bombarding employees with a quick PowerPoint presentation, a few days of training, or an inspirational speech won't cut it if they want to spread some goodness from the few to the many. Certainly, there are junctures in every scaling effort when it is wise to choose the easier path or secure a quick victory. Yet as we dug into case after case, and study after study, we saw that every allegedly easy and speedy scaling success turned out to be one we just hadn't understood very well. Scaling requires grinding it out, and pressing each person, team, group, division, or organization to make one small change after another in what they believe, feel, or do.That is what Claudia Kotchka learned during her seven-year effort to spread innovation practices at Procter & Gamble. As vice president of design innovation and strategy, Kotchka started with a tiny team and one project and ended with over three hundred innovation experts embedded in dozens of businesses. We asked her the most important lesson that she had gleaned about scaling. Kotchka responded that she was naturally impatient, someone who wanted things done "right now" and as quickly and easily as possible. This action orientation served her team well, driving them to make progress each day, find savvy shortcuts, and achieve quick wins. But Kotchka explained that her team would have failed to scale if this penchant for action hadn't been blended with patience and persistence. "My CEO, A. G. Lafley, reminded me how important it was again and again." Kotchka's advice is reminiscent of something a McKinsey consultant–a veteran of the scaling wars–told us: 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."This kind of discipline is equally important in small and young organizations. It has been a way of life for Shannon May and her team since they launched Bridge International Academies, the chain of low-cost and standardized elementary schools that we described in the Preface. Consider the grueling gauntlet that Bridge created for screening and training new teachers. In early 2012, they hired eight hundred teachers for fifty-one new schools and eighty-three existing schools. These are tough jobs: students attend school from 7:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each weekday and for half a day on Saturday, and teachers are required to maximize the time that students spend "on task and actively engaged." A thirty-person team from Bridge interviewed ten thousand candidates and gave each a battery of tests: reading, writing, and math exams. The team also had candidates give short speeches and hold one-on-one conversations with them to assess their ability to deliver material and interact with students. They invited 1,400 finalists (in two batches of 700) to a five-week training camp, where all were paid to learn Bridge's mindset, skills, and procedures. The team then selected the best 800 to teach Bridge's students.The Bridge team doesn't just view scaling as the Problem of More. As they expand, their goal isn't just to maintain the status quo. The team works day after day to make their system better. They never leave well enough alone. For example, they keep improving the technologies and content delivered via the phones and "hacked" Nook tablets used to collect money from parents, pay staff, deliver teaching materials, and monitor student and teacher performance. May also described a new effort to deliver questions and assignments to teachers that are customized for students in the same class at different ability levels.This kind of determination and discipline also defines people who spread excellence from the bottom or middle of organizations. In 1991, Andy Papa graduated from Stanford, where he had played as a defensive lineman on the football team for four years. Through luck and persistence, Papa landed a job on a NASCAR racing team based in North Carolina, which included being on the pit crew that changed tires, poured in fuel, made adjustments, and did quick repairs during races. Papa asked when the crew practiced pit stops. The answer was they didn't practice; most worked as mechanics during the week and didn't have time. A lightbulb went off in Papa's head: by transferring "the athletic mindset" he had learned in football to pit stops, they could get faster and more consistent–a big advantage, as the gap between winners and losers is so small in NASCAR races, with less than one second often separating the first- and second-place cars. Papa talked his crew into practicing a couple times a week for just twenty or thirty minutes, he started analyzing film of pit stops, and he tested different techniques (such as coiling the air hose in a figure-eight shape instead of a circle to reduce tangles). The crew's average time dropped from about twenty-two to twenty seconds and, more important, the frequency of awful pit stops plummeted.Papa eventually took this zeal for the "athletic mindset" to Hendrick Motorsports. He spent years as their "athletic director," overseeing the pit crews that serve elite drivers including Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Members of each crew are selected, trained, and coached by Papa and his colleagues, who enforce an exacting regimen of physical training, practice, and learning aimed at making stops faster (about fourteen seconds is the current goal) and more consistent during the thirty-six grueling races they compete in per year (each with six to twelve pit stops). This discipline has helped Hendrick win more championships than any NASCAR ownership group in history–including an unprecedented run of five Sprint Cup championships by Jimmie Johnson between 2006 and 2010.Claudia Kotchka, Shannon May, and Andy Papa have traveled different paths. But they all have something in common, an essential quality for grinding out the ground war and overcoming the inevitable setbacks and nasty surprises. These scaling stars have grit. Researcher Angela Duckworth and her colleagues found that grit "entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon, his or her advantage is stamina." Grit drives people to succeed, especially when they face daunting and prolonged challenges–a hallmark of every scaling effort.Scaling MantrasThis book zeros in on how and where to focus such perseverance as your organization struggles and strives to scale up excellence. We've identified reliable signs that scaling is going well or badly, and we've distilled these signals into seven mantras. If you are embarking on a scaling effort, memorize them, teach them to others, and invent ways to keep them firmly in focus–especially when the going gets rough.1. Spread a Mindset, Not Just a FootprintThere is a big difference between distributing your banner, logo, or motto as far and wide as possible versus having a deep and enduring influence on how employees and customers think, act, feel, and filter information. Scaling unfolds with less friction and more consistency when the people propelling it agree on what is right and wrong–and on what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Effective scaling depends on believing and living a shared mindset throughout your group, division, or organization. Scaling is analogous to a ground war rather than an air war because developing, spreading, and updating a mindset requires relentless vigilance. It requires stating the beliefs and living the behavior, and then doing so again and again. These shared convictions reduce confusion, disagreements, and unnecessary dead ends–and diminish the chances that excellence will fade as your footprint expands.Facebook demonstrates what it takes to instill and sustain a mindset even when an organization's footprint is spreading like wildfire. The company's crazy climb began that legendary night in February 2004 when nineteen-year-old Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg pounded down beers and programmed the crude but captivating first iteration of the site. Facebook amassed over a million users by the end of 2004 and a billion by the end of 2012. Facebook's future is impossible to know. Despite stumbles including a botched public offering, some pundits predict it will become more dominant than Apple and Google; others predict that it will flail and fade away like America Online.Whatever Facebook's fate, the twists and turns of how the company grew that colossal footprint in the eight short years before its 2012 public offering are instructive. By slowing down and shunning shortcuts when it came to developing the people who powered their expansion, leaders infused the company with the will, skill, and resilience to move quickly when and where it mattered. We've witnessed their ability to sustain this focus no matter how wild and out of control the ride became since 2006, when our conversations, interviews, and projects with people at Facebook began. They've done so despite brutal time pressures and distractions: adding as many as 3 million users per week and enduring intense media scrutiny (most start-ups aren't besieged with questions about toppling the Egyptian and Libyan governments), a Hollywood blockbuster that portrayed Zuckerberg in an unflattering light, nasty lawsuits, and withering user revolts–750,000 users objected to the News Feed feature in 2006 and millions complained about "Timeline" in 2012.This devotion to growing and grooming Facebook's people happened informally at first. In the early years, Zuckerberg was jammed together with his employees in cramped offices. He talked constantly about his convictions and why they powered Facebook's strategy–and employees watched and worked with him as he lived those beliefs. Once the company got too big for Zuckerberg to personally influence every employee, it took to more systematic methods, notably "Bootcamp." Facebook engineers and other product developers are hired after rounds of grueling interviews to assess their technical skills and cultural fit. But they are not placed in a specific job until six weeks after coming aboard. Management has a hunch about which role each new hire will play. Yet the final decision is not made until the end of "Bootcamp," which is designed and led almost entirely by engineers–not the HR staff.During Bootcamp, every new hire does small chores for a dozen or so diverse groups. Chris Cox, Facebook's thirty-one-year-old vice president of product, emphasizes that Bootcamp isn't just for figuring out which role is best for each newcomer. A more crucial aim is to infect each with the Facebook mindset. Bootcamp requires recruits to live Facebook's most sacred belief: "Move fast and break things." As Cox puts it, it is one thing to tell new engineers that they can change the code on the Facebook site. It is another thing for them to actually "touch the metal." He added, "We tell them, put your hand on it. Grab it. Now bend it." Cox told us about the newcomer whose dad called to say, "There's a problem with this drop-down menu." He called back the next day: "I fixed it, Dad. Did you see that?" That is the Facebook mindset–if you want people to move fast and fix things, they'd better feel safe to break some stuff along the way. When it comes to developing the site, going slow and trying to do things perfectly is taboo at Facebook. As engineer Sanjeev Singh explained, if you keep waiting for people to tell you what to do, don't ask for help when you get stuck, and won't show others your work until it is perfect, "you won't last long at Facebook."Bootcamp instills other beliefs about what is sacred and taboo at Facebook. Engineers are expected to understand the code base, not just the part they tend to each day. Working on many different parts helps newcomers grasp the big picture. Rotating through many groups also sets the expectation that any role they play at Facebook won't last long. Chris Cox worked as a programmer, a product designer, a project manager, the head of human resources, and the vice president of product during his first six years at the company. After Bootcamp, these beliefs continue to be reinforced. Engineer Jason Sobel explained that Facebook doesn't just tell new engineers that they likely won't be in any job for long; they live this philosophy via a "nearly mandatory" program called "hack-a-month" where–each year–they are "loaned" to another group for a month.SCALING MANTRAS1. 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."