Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 2

Today is Facebook’s 10th Anniversary. We didn’t plan it this way, but today, February 4th is also the official publication day for Scaling Up Excellence, which my Stanford colleague Huggy Rao devoted the last seven years to researching and writing.  Our interactions with Facebook go back to about the time we started working on the book, These encounters have ranged from informal conversations, to targeted interviews on scaling, to a class project on spreading Facebook sponsored and guided by the company, a presentation on growing Facebook by executives to our class on “Scaling Up Excellence,” and a bit of consulting back in 2008 on hiring and the profile of the “ideal” Facebook employee. 

Facebook is an especially instructive scaling case. The company’s struggles and successes taught us many lessons about “the problem of more,” the challenge of spreading and sustaining excellence as an organization or project expands.  As the story goes, “The Facebook” was built by 19 year old Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room as he pounded down beers late one night: The site went live on February 4th 2004, had 1000 users within days, and now boasts over one billion.  Facebook had moved to Palo Alto by 2006, located just a few blocks from the Stanford campus (where Huggy and I teach).  After executive Katie Geminder, then head of product, visited the d.school class I was teaching with Diego Rodriguez on Creating Infectious Action, I started having occasional conversations with her.  Over the years, Huggy and I  came to know quite a few key players at Facebook and talked to them now and then about the company’s wild ride – especially folks on the technical side including Chris Cox (employee number 30 now Vice-President of Product) and Mike Schroepfer (now Chief Technology Officer, everyone calls him Schrep). 

On the surface, it may seem that sustaining the company’s crazy growth largely a matter of keeping pace with the onslaught of thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people who flocked to the site – that while growing the company wasn’t easy, little effort was expended to attract and keep users, that hoardes of people just found the social site useful, even essential, so they came to signed-up and used it frequently with little prompting from the Facebook team.  Indeed, the controversial Facebook film The Social Network reinforces this view.

It sure didn’t feel that easy to people who worked at Facebook.  Just like other cases of successful scaling we studied, the company’s experience reinforced the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 in our book:

‘Listen.  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” behave as if they are fighting a ground war, not just an air war.’

When we interviewed Chris Cox in 2011, he emphasized that every day of Facebook’s manic journey was treated as a ground war by the company’s leaders.  In the early days, for example, when the site was restricted to college students, they had dozens of competitors.   Cox explained there were “Mark Zuckerbergs at 40 schools all trying to build Facebook. There was one in Columbia.  There were two at Dartmouth.  There were like four at Harvard.  Everybody was trying to build this idea.”  Zuckerberg’s team launched one battle after another to design the site and marketing strategy to vanquish competitors and conquer one school at a time.  

In case after case of successful scaling – be it adding more employees and customers or spreading new and better thoughts and deeds within an organization -- the savvy leaders we studied realized that fighting the ground war was the only way to spread the right mindset from those who lived it to those who didn’t.  They learned (often the hard way) that just bombarding employees with a quick PowerPoint presentation, a few days of training, or an inspirational speech from the CEO or Executive Director won’t cut it if the goal is to spread some goodness from the few to the many.  The best leaders kept grinding it out, pressing each person, team, or organization to make one little change after another in what they believed, felt, and did.    

That is what founders Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari did every day as they grew Pulse News to 4, then 7, then 11, and then to over 20 people (and sold the company to LinkedIn for 90 million dollars in 2013). That is what Claudia Kotchka did during her seven-year effort to spread innovation practices at Procter & Gamble.  When Kotchka was Vice-President of Design Innovation and Strategy, she started with a tiny team and one project and ended with over 300 innovation experts embedded in dozens of diverse P&G businesses.  And it was what Wyeth’s Pharmaceuticals  Michael Kamarck did as president of the firm’s manufacturing group.  This effort ultimately resulted in sharp cost reductions, increased quality, and an upswing in employee commitment and pride across the firm’s 37 plants (Wyeth is now part of Pfizer). Kamarack began with an air war – creating the corporate equivalent of shock and awe by expressing alarm about costs and quality, setting seemingly impossible goals (especially cutting costs by 25% and increasing quality at the same time), and talking about guiding principles for change. 

This air war set the stage for the ground war. Weyth’s leaders, working in concert with external consultants, started two or three “mini-transformations” in each of eight plants.  After creating a deep pockets of excellence in teams with those mini-transformations, they then slowly and systematically cascaded such excellence to one team after another in those eight plants.  They then used the same process to create and spread excellence throughout the rest of the Wyeth plants.  Most plants hit Kamarck’s 25% cost-saving goals and many exceeded it and quality increased in nearly every plant.  And, as leaders at Wyeth told us, the process felt like “Changing the behaviors and mindsets of 17,000 people …. one person at a time.”

Certainly, scaling is tougher going in some settings than others.  There are also junctures in every effort where it is wise to take short cuts or secure a quick win.   Yet after digging into one case after another, and study after study, every allegedly speedy and easy scaling success turned out to be just one we hadn’t understood very well.  A report from the Casey Foundation brings this point home.  The Foundation did a post-mortem of  their five-year 50 million dollar “New Futures” program, which developed and spread practices for cutting dropout and pregnancy rates among “at risk”  teens and dampening “unemployment and inactivity after high school”  in six U.S. cities.  Casey titled their report “The Path of Most Resistance” because taking the harder, slower, and tougher road was usually best – and shortcuts typically backfired.  The best leaders, for example, worked doggedly to confront, nag, and eventually wear-down stubborn bureaucrats to change rules about allocating money to reduce hassles for the teens and families they served.

After spending seven years studying scaling, Huggy and I have learned to worry when a leader or team says “we wish we had time to do things right, but we just don’t” or, worse, “we always try to take the path of least resistance.”   Yes, we identified many tactics and strategies that organizations can use to make scaling happen a bit faster, to be a bit less messy, and to increase your odds of success.  But there is no quick, easy, or sure fire formula.   When we asked P&G’s Claudia Kotchka about the most important thing she learned about scaling up innovation practices and positions across that giant company, she answered “Patience. Persistence. My CEO, AG Lafley, reminded me how important it was again and again.”   

Note: I also posted this on LinkedIn this morning on my "Influencer" page. 

If you pre-order Scaling Up Excellence by Friday, January 24th, my publisher will mail you the above "Year of Subtraction" calender. It is 11" x 17." You can see a bigger version by clicking on the above image. They will also send you a pdf of the preface and first chapter along with a podcast of a conversation that Huggy Rao and I had with David Kelley, the primary founder of both IDEO and the Stanford d.school. David, one of the book's stars, is blunt, funny, and wise as he explains his scaling philosophies and methods.  You can take advantage of the offer here.  In addition, I wrote a longer post on this blog a couple weeks ago if you want to learn about more details and the back story. 

The journey that Huggy Rao and I have taken to write, and yes, now peddle our book Scaling Up Excellence has taken many strange and amusing turns.  Publication date is getting mighty close.  It ships February 4th.  The transition from "production" to sales has been a bit jarring for both of us.  We spent a full seven years working on this book and it has been pretty much all I have worked on writing for the last three years. The writing wasn't really finished until a few months ago and the last minor edit was finished just about six weeks ago.  When people asked me what I was doing during 2013, I often joked -- truthfully -- that 'I am trying to type my way out of solitary confinement in my garage." (See my last post, I actually quite liked the self-imposed imprisonment). 

Now BOOM I have escaped from the garage and we are in full-blown book promotion mode.  It is fun and we are delighted to finally be able to have a book to sell after all those years in "design and production" mode.  Thank goodness, we have a wonderful team at Crown Books who are carrying much of the load -- but the switch from the privacy of writing to the public engagement (and silliness) of promotion is still a disconcerting, I confess. 

One of the most fun things that we have worked on in recent days is an offer to entice people to pre-order the book.  The first couple weeks after a book is published are (like the opening of a movie) important to its long-term success and impact. So every publisher comes up with ways to motivate pre-orders, as they help fuel the early sales numbers. But I have never worked with a publisher that has put together a "package" like the one just assembled by the Crown team. It reminds me of one those late night TV ads where they keep saying "wait, there is more."  You can see the offer here, at www.scalingupexcellence.com. This site was built by the Justin Gammon, the same skilled guy who designed our book cover. In our biased view, it looks great. The offer ends January 24th. Here are the goodies and a bit about each:

Crown will mail you a 2014 "The Year of Subtraction" wall calender. It lists nine points from the book to spur ideas about removing sources of friction, cognitive load, and destructive behaviors that impede the spread of excellence.  You can see it here -- but the picture does not quite do it justice. It is pretty big, about 11 by 17 inches, and the quality is quite good. To give you taste, the points include "Stop doing dumb things because everyone else does," "Teams busting at the seams?," and "Choking on jargon monoxide?" (inspired by Polly LaBarre) -- each followed by a short illustration.

Clearly, although we say that scaling is a "problem of both more and less," there is a lot more to it than just subtraction.  But Huggy and I were inspired to do this calender by "the subtraction game" that we've been using lately as an exercise during scaling speeches and workshops.  People love to play it. We put them duos or groups and ask them what things are getting in the way of scaling up excellence and to outline how they might get rid of these impediments -- we give them between 5 and 20 minutes, and it is amazing what they produce.   We've done it with groups from Stanford including 25 or so senior executives in our development office and about 200 managers and executives in "business affairs" (i.e., they deal with budgets and related financial issues), with 70 or so senior executives from an insurance company, with 20 "high potentials" at a clothing retailer, and a several other groups.  We are getting reports of subtraction that has happened as a result: One organization combined two heavily overlapping processes, another transferred a rather destructive executive to a different role in hopes that he can improve his performance (if not, they are going let him go), and our favorite -- the executive who pledged to send a dollar to charity for every email he sends (we need to follow-up and see if he is sticking to it). 

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE

 Crown will send you a sneak peek pdf of the preface and Chapter 1.  So you can start reading before your shiny new book (it really is shiny) arrives (or you download it) on February 4th. The preface talks about how we became obsessed with "the problem of more" and introduces overarching lessons including that scaling in organizations always starts and ends with individuals and that, to do it well, sometimes you've got to think and act as if you are knee-deep in a manageable mess.  Chapter 1 starts with the most important lesson we learned and then moves through nine scaling mantras including "spread a mindset, not just a footprint" and "fear the clusterfug."  You will also learn why, to scale faster later, sometimes the best advice is "don't just do something, stand there." 

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE

A rollicking conversation with David Kelley available -- for now -- only to people who pre-order. Last Monday, Huggy and I had a wide-ranging and informal talk with David Kelley about the challenges he faced in scaling two successful quite "disruptive" organizations where he is the primary founder: IDEO and the Stanford d.school.  David, who is one of the book's scaling heroes and someone we know well, was, as always, wise, funny, and looked at the problem in a way that others don't.  In particular, David explained how, when you scale, you have to accept that you will never have the perfect team or workforce, that sure, you get the best you can, but perfection isn't possible, so you've got to look past the weaknesses that people have and take the good they have to offer.  He was not just talking about this in the abstract -- he used my strengths and weaknesses as the main example (I am a co-founder of the d.school, so David knows me well).   Only people who pre-order the book get access now to this fun conversation.

So that is our offer.  I am biased, but I think it is pretty good.  Of course, we are following the rules of late night TV commercials: We offering it only for a limited time (until January 24th) and there are a limited number of calenders as well! 

If you do try the pre-offer, Huggy and I would  love to know what you think of the calender and the conversation with David Kelley -- as well as the book itself, of course! 

P.S.  Huggy and I especially thank the amazing Ayelet Gruenspecht at Crown, who the driving force behind making the offer come to life.  Ayelet is the master of turning knowledge into action. 

P.P.S. Alas, this offer is only for people in the United States.  I am sorry that it isn't for people in other countries -- this is because a different group distributes the book in every country, even in Canada! 

A few months back,  Pam Slim's publisher sent me an advanced copy of her book Body of Work: Finding the Thread that Ties Your Story Together.  Today is the official publication day -- you owe it to yourself to buy a copy, as reading it is a great way to start the new year. 

I was struck by how useful, engaging, and downright fun that Body of Work was to read.  For starters, Pam applies a compelling frame -- as the title says -- where she advises that each of us would be better off as thinking of our career as a body of work rather than climbing a ladder or taking the path to the top. I found that so simple and so powerful -- both because I think it is a more accurate frame, and because it focuses attention on what gives each of us intrinsic joy, not just on the competitive nature of work and the money.  It is very much what I've picked up from Pixar's Ed Catmull -- if you focus on doing work you are proud of, your odds of having financial success and recognition go way up, and -- no matter what -- you will feel proud and engaged as you travel through your days. 

Beyond that compelling frame, the book is filled with all kinds of wonderful advice and checklists. Chapters touch on everything from "Define Your Roots, to "Choose Your Work Mode," to "Your Definition of Success." My favorite is "Surf the Fear." Pam shows how it is inevitable, how to use fear and adversity to spur your growth, how to deal with unexpected and nasty surprises, and how to overcome distress and procrastination.  

Finally, as with most readers, I don't just look for a useful parade of facts an tips when I read a book like this, I want to enjoy getting to know the person who is writing it a bit. Pam's book is filled with stories from various experiences, both personal and professional, and even more important than that, Pam's enthusaisim, her ability to deal with the problem at hand but not to take it all too seriously, and generally be the kind of person you trust and like comes through in every page of this gem.

I just ordered a copy for my 21 year-old daughter who is in her senior of college -- it is a great book for her as contemplates the body of work she wants to build.  But it is a great book for any of us at every career stage because it is so useful, and as I have said, such a delightful read. It will make you feel good about yourself, while, at the same time, show the path to achieving a kind of success that will please you -- not just others. 

A few years back, one of my closest friends at Stanford, Steve Barley, made a comment that I still think of often “If you are what you do, then I am a sociologist.”  Steve was making a general point (drawn from sociological theory on identity) and specific point about himself.  The general point was that the behavior that people display – regardless of their intentions and the claims they make to others – are the best indicator of both their sense of self and of how others see them.  The specific point was that although Steve is an engineering professor and his doctorate is from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, because of the intellectual tools he uses day after day in his research – things like social network theory, ethnographic methods, and theories of the sociology of work and technology – he sees himself as a sociologist (and most other scholars do too).  

I have been thinking of Steve’s comment because, as I have looked back on the last year (and my last 30 years as a professor at Stanford), if you are what you do, then I am a writer.   Of course, how skilled a writer I am is for others to judge.   But if I look back over the past three years (especially September of 2012 through October of 2013) pretty much all I did most days was to work on the text of Scaling Up Excellence.  Of course, my co-author Huggy Rao was involved heavily.  We had daily discussions about the language, lessons, theory, examples, and flow.  And Huggy was constantly introducing new practices and examples, and wrote initial drafts of many parts of the book.  But as the book unfolded, our roles became clear: the final drafting and editing, and compulsive rounds of revision were mostly my job.   This was partly because I am a control freak, partly because this my sixth business book (Huggy’s past writing had focused mainly on academic writings), and –- to return to Steve Barley’s test –- I realized that I am happiest and feel most comfortable in my own skin when I am writing, reading a draft, re-writing it, or thinking about writing.

If you start with graduate school in the late 1970s, although I did other things necessary for writing peer reviewed articles – interviews, designing and collecting survey data, data analysis, meetings with co-authors, and reading related research – my main work activity for the last 35 years day after day has been writing. What I wrote changed as I moved from being a doctoral student, to assistant professor working to get tenure, to mid-career researcher, to, now, as an academic who is mostly interested in applying academic rigor to helping people in organizations tackle real problems.  But writing was and is the main thing I do and want to do.

During the final years of Scaling Up Excellence, when people asked me what was I up to, I often joked that I was trying to type myself out of solitary confinement in my garage (see above picture – that is where I do most of my serious writing and what it looks like now).  But when they said “that must be tough” or “aren’t you lonely,” I said that, when it comes to my work, I am happiest when I am by myself writing.   This sentiment often surprises people, as I seem like such an extrovert.  And I do like being around other people – just not too much! 

Another sign that my identity is as a writer is evident in what I read for fun.  Huggy, who is one of the leading quantitative organizational researchers on the planet, reads statistic books for pleasure.  In contrast, I have always read books about the craft of writing for pleasure (and inspiration).  My belief that academics would be better writers if they read such books has got me in trouble:  When I was an editor at an academic journal called the Administrative Science Quarterly, I sent a copy of Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style to a renowned scholar (she wrote terrible sentences).  She never spoke to me again (but I did detect some improvement in her writing). I especially love some of the old “Writers at Work” interviews published in the Paris Review – especially this set edited by George Plimpton.  It has interviews with famous writers including T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and a rather grumpy Ernest Hemingway who didn’t really want to talk about his process.  But Hemingway did say that every writer needs a “a built-in shock-proof shit de­tector.” I love that. (Update: The complete set of the Paris Review interviews are online, spanning from the 1950's to the 2010's. I have been reading through them this morning.  I especially like Truman Capote from 1957 and William Gibson from 2011, but I have a couple hundred left to read)

I am also fond of Stephen King’s amazing if disjointed On Writing, I resonated with his motivation for writing this book about how he practices his craft – that he wanted people to understand that his day job was “about the language.”  Along these lines,I don’t think that Huggy was quite prepared for the perhaps 1000 conversations that I initiated about the words we used and how our sentences sounded during our seven year scaling project.  I was also astounded to learn that, for big hunk of Stephen King’s career, he consumed huge amounts of beer and (later) cocaine as he wrote (he was drinking a case – 24 cans – of 16oz tallboys a day before he went on the wagon in the late 1980s).  He wrote The Shining and Misery when he was totally wasted (not just drunk – some days he had cotton swabs jammed in his nose to stop the bleeding from all the cocaine abuse – but he kept typing).  

The business book world is a bit weird because, well, lots of people produce best sellers who don’t spend their days writing.  There are a lot of ghost writers out there – much of what you read under the bylines of CEOs, consultants, and management gurus are written by others. Sometimes the writers are listed as authors and other times they are not.  The first time I did an HBR article, back in about 1998, our editor Suzy Wetlaufer (now Welch, she married Jack) asked me “are you the author, the writer, or both?” I was dumbfounded by the question, but I have since learned that “writers” play an important and usually honorable role in spreading ideas about leadership, innovation, and so on.  I have also learned that some great books are produced when a person with great ideas has a mind meld with a great professional writer (as happened with Creativity Inc.)

 But this post is about and for people like me who are writers, or aspire to be, by Steve Barley’s definition.  Writing is such a quirky and individualistic process that what works for me probably won’t work for you, but here are some of the lessons that the process of getting the scaling book done reinforced for me:

1. I go through periods where I fret and suffer over what I am going to write – I can’t write anything that meets my standards without first going such periods of purgatory.  This fretting time is in addition to the research and reading that I do.  I often can’t tell the difference between when I am procrastinating and when I my brain is working out what to do next – the main indication is, usually quite suddenly, I shift gears from being unable to write to being able to produce sentences and paragraphs.  This process isn’t necessary for everyone.  My co-author Jeff Pfeffer’s ability to just blast things out amazes me, for example.   For me, as I get closer to being able to write something, I start seeing the flow in my mind’s eye and start hearing the words I am going to write in my head.   For a short piece, such as this blog post, the fretting might go on for an hour or less, for the book, I spent months (and many long bike rides) trying to think of the structure, and especially the language for the book proposal – which was quite detailed (22,000 words) and then I went through another few months of such fretting before I could really start writing the book.   And before I started work on each chapter, I usually had to go through about a week of this discomfort. Yes, I would talk to Huggy pretty much every day, we would meet and brainstorm, we would do interviews, talk to colleagues, and read research – but the fretting was somehow different.

2.  Once I am able to produce text, my productivity is a direct function of how much time I spend at the keyboard MINUS the amount of time I spend poking around the web – emails, shopping, social media, reading news stories and weird articles,  and all that necessary stuff and addictive nonsense.  Most of my lessons are pretty idiosyncratic, but my experience with doctoral students, faculty, and now people who aspire to write more for more applied audiences suggests that this lesson is universal. Talking about writing isn’t writing. Sitting in front of the screen and intending to write, but doing 10 hours of emails instead (I have had plenty of days like that), or shopping for a new dress or a new car don’t count. Nor does Facebook or Twitter.

3. One of my favorite lines in the Paris Review from comes from Aldous Huxley: "All my thoughts are second thoughts."  As I’ve confessed on this blog before, all my thoughts are third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. I spend at least 50% of my productive time reading and editing drafts I already have.  When I am working a chapter, I start at the beginning and read and edit almost every day before getting to the new text (even though that is usually what I have been fretting over).  When a chapter is done, I put it aside for a couple days, and then go back and edit it again before showing it to anyone. 

4. I edit by ear, as I have heard it called. I know that many writers have better writing styles. But I am not happy – and I feel fake –when something I write sounds like someone else.  Especially in my books, there is a tone, a voice, I try to maintain throughout that sounds like --- I hope – how I talk, but is smarter and more organized. Bascially, for me, listening to the voice I hear in my head and trying to get it to sound just right to my ear is the backbone of my writing process.  (Also, each of my books has a somewhat different voice – Scaling Up Excellence is less edgy than The No Asshole Rule).

I am VERY protective of my writing voice.  I reject many many changes from editors and copyeditors that undermine it (in my biased opinion).  And while most what I write is grammatically correct, I will break rules when necessary. I have had some mighty good editors over the years – Julia Kirby at HBR is probably the best (she has never done a book of mine, only articles), and Rick Wolff who did The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, as well as Roger Scholl who did Scaling Up Excellence, are both skilled editors and get my voice obsession.

As an author, you’ve got to be careful because, at every stage, there are editors and others who mean well, but stamp out your spirit and make your words sound dull (For one of my books, I had an awful copyeditor who would have ruined the book – I rejected over 90% of her changes).  Here, I have a suggestion for authors that most publishers won’t like, but if they were smart, they would do it routinely.  Right before your book goes to the copyediting stage, insist on having a conversation with your copyeditor and explain what you are trying to accomplish, and listen to his or perspective too.  And insist on seeing the editing in the first chapter after it is done. That way, you and the copyeditor won’t waste a lot of work.  (Note I feel so strongly about this that I am going to start putting it in as a requirement in book contracts – copyeditors are crucial to the quality of a book, but they also are strong willed people who can kill your voice).

In general, my experience is that about 50% of the editing (of any kind) I have had makes things better and 50% makes things worse. So my attitude is that, at every stage, you need to be vigilant about people who will screw up your work, as the risk always lurks.  (Warning: titles are often the worst.  I can’t tell you how many articles and blog posts I have had re-titled by people who clearly didn’t read them or twisted the meaning massively.  Ask for approval of any title of anything you write.  A lot of publications won’t like that either – but it has your name on it).

5.  As suggested above, I am obsessed with words. I am always looking for interesting words and phrases, and always trying to eliminate language that strike me as hollow or mind-numbing. Consider “adding value” and “capabilities.”  I don’t know why, but as soon as I hear someone say those words or I read them, I glaze over. I never use them.  I was soured on “adding value” at the World Economic Forum at Davos a few years back. I noticed that CEOs used it to avoid specifics or human emotions, and sometimes, as code for “as long as we make a lot of money, it does not matter how many evil things we do."  And I don’t like the word “capabilities” because it often seems to be used by executives and experts who are talking about the skills, motivations, and experience held by the people in an organization – while, at the same time, as way to avoid digging into the nuances and messiness of how those people actually propel the organization forward. 

I have kept a running list of words and phrases called “Words I Like” since about 2000. I add something about once a week. It has 795 words right now (fewer entries, as many are phrases), which range from “mangle,” to “trapped in a perpetual present tense,” to “pizzaz,” to “poisonous protection,” to “ruckus,” to “satisfying triple whammy.”  The challenge – and what I strive for as I edit by ear – is to use interesting words that sound like me, but do not to distract or confuse the reader.  (I dislike how publications like the New Yorker sometimes seem to use words, phrases, and obscure references that seem designed to make their readers feel dumb.)  I also admit that I love and use some words too much, such as “propel,” “incite,” and “infect.”   I usually have to go back through and cross out about 50% of these and other darlings because they get repetitive (a skilled editor like Roger Scholl notices and saves me from myself). 

6.  Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, the longer that Huggy and I worked on Scaling Up Excellence, the more of a social process the writing became.  Not just between the two of us. But especially between us and the long and diverse list of people we worked with who were knee-deep in scaling challenges.  That is why the Appendix is called “The Seven Year Conversation.”  Getting the flow, language, and logic right required the above writing process.  But we wove in additional steps to get the stories right -- to help assure both the facts, advice, and emotional tone rang true to people who are knee-deep in scaling challenges. 

We constantly sent short snippets and long sections that we wrote to the stars of the book for their review and comments.  We are  grateful for how patient (and smart) these scaling veterans were -- including Claudia Kotchka (who led the spread of innovation practices and roles at Procter & Gamble), Bonny Simi (JetBlue), John Lilly (now a venture capitalist at Greylock), Perry Klehbahn (head of executive ed at the Stanford d. School), Dr. Louise Liang (who led an amazing scaling effort at Kaiser Permanente as they rolled out their computerized patient record system), Michael Dearing (a venture capitalist and d.school teacher), Chris Fry and Steve Green (who did impressive scaling at Salesforce.com and now are senior execs at Twitter), and many many others.  We also presented our emerging ideas and key stories to at least 100 diverse audiences -- and refined the content and emphasis of the book based on what seemed interesting (and dull) to them.  We did use other sources – academic research, press reports, and our own observations and experiences – that did not require such interactions.  But Scaling Up Excellence is the product of a decidedly “social” approach -- even though it required thousands of hours of solo work.

Again, I am not sure that the above six ideas reflect how other writers work or will help others with their writing. Although I am pretty confident that my second point is universal, that writing productivity is a direct function of the amount of time that you actually spend writing (Stephen King might have been drunk and stoned when he was writing Misery, but he kept on working away at the manuscript).

I would be curious to hear about your writing process from those readers who practice this or a related craft.  More broadly, I am curious to hear about the kinds of workplace and business writing that appeals to you (and the kinds that you can’t stand).

Finally, to return to Steve Barley’s “you are what you do,” I was simply unable to write anything but emails for about six weeks after our book was done and copyedited in early fall.  But now – today is a good example– I seem to be back to myself and am spending a lot of time writing.  So look for more blog posts here, at LinkedIIn, HBR, and elsewhere.  We are also working on articles for various outlets -- I just did one for Wired UK that was fun, and we have multiple ideas for tying the ideas in Scaling Up Excellence to current news stories. 

If you have suggestions about scaling stories we should know about or scaling themes we should write about, please let us know your thoughts. 

Thanks to all the influencers who wrote, we kicked in a few extras at the end, but they are all gone for now!  Enjoy the holidays and thanks to everyone for so many supportive notes. 

As many of you know, Huggy Rao and I have a new book called Scaling Up Excellence coming out in February. We worked on the darn thing for about seven years.  We believe it is the first business book that takes a comprehensive look at scaling in organizations (and we go beyond business with examples from education, non-profits, government, and especially health care).  The book is getting some nice advance notice, for example, from Forbes and Adam Grant at LinkedIn, and as I wrote here earlier this week, we received varied and enthusiastic blurbs for the book.

These people could comment on the book because my publisher (as most do) printed up advanced copies of the book, or "galleys" (as they are called in the book business) and sent them to key influencers.  These "uncorrected proofs" are bound with a cover, but are printed on cheaper paper than the real book will be.  And they do contain a few minor typos and errors. But the content is virtually the same as the "real" book, it is just not as pretty.

I was talking to my publisher today, and it turns out we still have a few galleys left, and as publication date is approaching, I suggested that we offer them to "influencers" who might be interested in the book and perhaps writing about it on their Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or whatever social media they use.

SO HERE COMES THE OFFER

If you are an active influencer of some kind -- let's say that you somehow reach out to and are read by 300 or more followers on a regular basis -- we will send you a galley if you act fast.  Here is how it works:

1. We only have 50 give away, when they are gone, they are gone.

2. If you want a galley,and are an influencer that more or less meets the above standards, please send me an email by Monday at Noon (Pacific Standard Time). Please include a URL so I can check you out. If you are a legit influencer, I will forward it to my publisher.  Please include a mailing address as my publisher will be mailing it to you -- there are no electronic copies. Click on my email here.  It is really me, not the PR people who are working to promote the book. 

3. Of course, if you are one of the lucky 50 people who get a galley, Huggy and I hope you will write something about the book and the word out -- and please note it may take a couple weeks to arrive.

I look forward to hearing from you! 

Thanks

Bob Sutton

As many of you know, Huggy Rao and I have a new book called Scaling Up Excellence coming out in February. We worked on the darn thing for about seven years.  We believe it is the first business book that takes a comprehensive look at scaling in organizations (and we go beyond business with examples from education, non-profits, government, and especially health care).  The book is getting some nice advance notice, for example, from Forbes and Adam Grant at LinkedIn, and as I wrote here earlier this week, we received varied and enthusiastic blurbs for the book.

These people could comment on the book because my publisher (as most do) printed up advanced copies of the book, or "galleys" (as they are called in the book business) and sent them to key influencers.  These "uncorrected proofs" are bound with a cover, but are printed on cheaper paper than the real book will be.  And they do contain a few minor typos and errors. But the content is virtually the same as the "real" book, it is just not as pretty.

I was talking to my publisher today, and it turns out we still have a few galleys left, and as publication date is approaching, I suggested that we offer them to "influencers" who might be interested in the book and perhaps writing about it on their Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or whatever social media they use.

SO HERE COMES THE OFFER

If you are an active influencer of some kind -- let's say that you somehow reach out to and are read by 300 or more followers on a regular basis -- we will send you a galley if you act fast.  Here is how it works:

1. We only have 50 give away, when they are gone, they are gone.

2. If you want a galley,and are an influencer that more or less meets the above standards, please send me an email by Monday at Noon (Pacific Standard Time). Please include a URL so I can check you out. If you are a legit influencer, I will forward it to my publisher.  Please include a mailing address as my publisher will be mailing it to you -- there are no electronic copies. Click on my email here.  It is really me, not the PR people who are working to promote the book. 

3. Of course, if you are one of the lucky 50 people who get a galley, Huggy and I hope you will write something about the book and the word out -- and please note it may take a couple weeks to arrive.

I look forward to hearing from you! 

Thanks

Bob Sutton

About a month ago, Huggy Rao, our editor Roger Scholl, and I wrapped up the process of collecting advanced praise, or "blurbs" as they call them in the book business, for Scaling Up Excellence.   I have frankly have mixed feelings about blurbs. First, it is rather odd to ask someone to praise your book.  You aren't asking them for an objective review.  Second, my last two books sold well -- both were New York Times bestsellers -- and we didn't use blurbs on either hardback.  The No Asshole Rule had no blurbs at all. We asked a few well-known people to blurb it, and each said -- in essence -- "I love the book but don't want my name on something with the word asshole on it."  After that, because the book sold so well, I didn't believe much in blurbs, so we didn't put any on the hardcover of my next book, Good Boss, Bad Boss. But I did later collect some to put on book sales sites such as Amazon and they ended-up on the paperback. 

For Scaling Up Excellence, our editor Roger Scholl convinced us that blurbs made more sense. For starters, it has no dirty words on the cover!  Asking people for blurbs would get it in the hands of well-known people who were interested in scaling --which was good for spreading word even if they elected not to blurb it. And we hoped that a broad set of blurbists would convey to readers that our ideas were pertinent to all kinds of leaders, teams, and organizations -- not just start-ups or big companies, for example.  Of course, we hope the list below will help sell some books. But the process of collecting them was surprisingly encouraging and downright enjoyable because we had so many friendly exchanges --some with old friends and some with people we didn't know before making the request. 

For starters, my past experience with blurbs is that about 50% of the people you ask turn you down, never answer, or promise a blurb but don't get around to doing it. That is one of the reasons we asked so many (in addition for our desire for diversity).  We were surprised and pleased with the high response rate.  We asked 28 people and got 23 blurbs. Of the those five, two turned us down (each said the same thing -- the same argument I use -- they only endorse books when they can read the whole thing, and they didn't have time to do it).  One never wrote back and two others have a policy of doing no blurbs at all (including the dean of a business school who didn't want to be in a position of blurbing some of his faculty members' books and not others and a famous CEO who turns them all down, as otherwise he said he would be deluged).  And we were especially heartened  by the enthusiastic the emails that we got along with the blurbs from people including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Teresa Amabile, Google's Laszlo Bock, and Pixar's Ed Catmull. 

Perhaps the most heartening of all was Tom Peters' response.  Frankly, we didn't even ask him at first because, given he is the original "Excellence" author, we assumed it would be presumptuous and he would just say no.  Then, just a week or so before the deadline, I did a Commonwealth Club gig with Tom and David Kelley about their great new book Creative Confidence.  Tom told me he was puzzled that we never asked  Tom Peters, and said he would get in touch with Peters about it -- I told Tom that doubted he would do it, especially on such short notice.  We are still a but stunned by the response. Peters not only came back quickly with a glowing blurb (thank you Tom) and very warm personal note. He tweeted about it several times and wrote us several spontaneous little "love notes" about the book in the following weeks. 

As I said, we hope these blurbs sell some books.  But, even if they don't sell a single book, the process has been wonderful because people have been so encouraging.  This gives us confidence as the February 4th publication date.  And as Adam Grant's research suggests, it is a reminder of how many generous and successful people are out there. All of these people are very busy and we know that most had more important things to do than to blurb our book -- but they took the time to do it anyway.  Here is the set, which I find both humbling and surprising each time I read it:

"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

“Scaling Up Excellence is one of the finest business books you'll ever read. It is rich with vivid examples, deep research, and practical advice on the toughest challenge organizations confront: how to spread success from a few small pockets of an organization to its entire fabric. Whether you're an entrepreneur who wants to get big, a CEO who wants to avoid stagnation, or a non-profit executive who wants make a deeper difference, Scaling Up Excellence is an essential read -- a playbook that belongs on the desk of every leader.” -Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
 
“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, GE

“The Internet creates new possibilities for scaling, but scaling rarely happens because of technology alone. 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 #1 NYT bestseller The Start-up of You
 
“Growth and reinvention are key to winning, especially in tech. In Scaling Up Excellence,  Sutton and Rao outline a real-world view of the challenges leaders face, and provide wisdom and practical tips about how to master them. I loved the insights.” -Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe Systems

“Startups sow the seeds of their culture from the very first day. Yet their ultimate success depends on knowing when and how to scale.  Drawing on first hand accounts from a wide range of industries, Scaling Up Excellence is the first book to offer a detailed examination of the best practices needed to successfully scale without diluting the very qualities that made a company successful in the first place. An important book for corporations and entrepreneurs alike.” -Eric Ries, bestselling author of The Lean Startup

"Maintaining excellence while growing is full of pitfalls and pain, and requires a great deal of thoughtfulness.  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.  Sutton and Rao keep us focused on the personal actions required for tackling this leadership challenge.”  -Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation Studios

“One of the challenges faced by any complex organization is how to improve performance by sharing best practices within the organization. Too often, scaling is done as an art. To be done well, it needs to be a science. ‘Scaling Up Excellence’ elevates scaling to a core competency instead of a talent. This is a worthwhile book to read.”  -George Halvorson, chairman of the board, Kaiser Permanente 

“A must-read. Renowned experts Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao are the first to tackle a pervasive problem that every leader faces: spreading and multiplying success. This landmark book is full of rich examples, powerful studies, and actionable insights for anyone who cares about making groups or organizations more effective.” - Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of Give and Take

“Sutton and Rao provide an illuminating perspective that is particularly useful for leaders and teams about to embark on their own challenging journey to scaling excellence. The stories and studies shared by the authors provide valuable strategic and practical advice, which will increase your odds of success when they are combined with the real “grit” required to make improvements.”   -Ann L. Lee,  senior vice president, Genentech and Global Head of pharma technical development, Roche 

"We are all searching for new ways to build more effective teams, startups, and organizations that will stand the test of time. Through compelling research, stories, and narrative, Scaling Up Excellence will show you how to help your best ideas reach a much wider audience. If you want to have a big impact . . . make sure your entire team reads this book." –Tom Rath, bestselling author of Strengthsfinder 2.0

“An engaging exploration of a powerful and frequently neglected source of competitive advantage: Finding ways to spread and sustain the best ideas and practices we already know how to do. Packed with inspiring examples of how to make it happen –or miss out.”-Martin Riant, Group President Baby, Feminine and Family Care, Procter & Gamble Co.
 
“If you want your organization to expand and grow without losing what makes you special, this is the book for you.  Sutton and Rao have written a must-read handbook for scaling.” -Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick
 
 “Scaling Up Excellence offers a strong antidote to the common pap--the delusions, impatience and incompetence-- that too often frustrate reforms and keep many good ideas from achieving their goals.  Through engaging accounts of both organizational successes and colossal failures, Sutton and Rao offer practical wisdom for scaling improvements in  complex institutions.  Anyone involved in the work of improvement should hold this book close at hand.” -Anthony S. Bryk, president, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
 
 “Rather than a one size fits all recipe for what to do in scaling up your company,  Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao offer  guidelines for action in easy to read terms, based on case studies and research conducted over the last seven years.  If you are interested in excellence using the principle of Less is More, this is the book to read." -Riccardo Illy, Chairman, Grupo Illy, S.p.A

“Scaling Up Excellence is the best book I’ve ever seen on making an organization’s vision come true. Sutton and Rao have created a deeply practical guide that is also a great read, grounded equally in astonishing stories and rigorous research. No matter what you do for a living, read this book to figure out how to link your “short-term realities to long-term dreams.” - Teresa M. Amabile, professor, Harvard Business School and coauthor, The Progress Principle

 “Taking a small, manageable organization and making it into a big, successful enterprise is a major challenge in healthcare or any other industry. Robert  Sutton and Huggy Rao take the mystery out of ‘going large’ with memorable mantras and fascinating case studies. Scaling Up Excellence shows the high roads – and the pitfalls – on the way to bigger and better.  Delos M. Cosgrove MD, CEO and President, Cleveland Clinic

 “Inspiring stories, compelling research, and actionable ideas masterfully woven together and immediately usable by any entrepreneur or manager.” -Clara Shih, CEO and Founder of Hearsay Social, member of Starbucks Board of Directors

“Sustaining exceptional performance in growing organizations is critical in today’s world.  Sutton and Rao bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to identifying best practices in a straightforward and accessible way.  If you want to grow your business, you need this book.” – Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone

"Rao and Sutton have hit on an important challenge for leaders in every organization - companies, social sector and government: how do you scale what works, and do it faster. The challenge of finding pockets of excellence and changing mindsets and behavior so that success becomes the norm not abnormal is very real for those who want to make excellence stick. Scaling up Excellence is a useful roadmap for today's change leaders" -Lenny Mendonca, Director Emeritus, McKinsey and Company, Founder, Half Moon Bay Brewing Company

“Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao’s book provides insights on the key principles of scaling for excellence. For entrepreneurs or business leaders at the forefront of organizational growth, “Scaling up excellence” is a treasure trove of case studies and industry showcases.” -N. R. Narayana Murthy, Executive Chairman, Infosys Limited

"Scaling Up Excellence is a masterpiece. I have been wrestling with the same conundrum for 30 years, and I simply marvel at the way Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao have disentangled this supremely important Gordian knot."-Tom Peters, bestselling author of In Search of Excellence

Once again, we thank each of these folks for their kind words and for taking the time to write them.  

In closing, I have some advice for any author who is trying to get a blurb for me, or for that matter from most other leaders, authors, and others who are asked to do a lot of them.  Other people can help you in specific cases -- by introducing you to a potential endorser or even asking for you. We got help landing two or three of the above blurbs -- especially from Tom Kelley and Roger.  But your odds of success are a lot higher most of the time if you ask them yourself.  Sure, you can hand it off to your editor or a publicist, but not only are your odds lower, you miss the chance to make a connection with someone who you probably want to know a bit -- and probably wants to know you.  Finally, if someone else does land a blurb for you -- or even a thoughtful rejection -- write the blurbist a personal thank you note.  Only good things can come of it. 

Greg McKeown's publisher sent me an advanced copy of his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.  I said I would look at for a possible blurb (I don't do advanced praise for a lot of books, in part, because I now insist on reading the whole thing before I do -- and it takes time).  I was ready to NOT be impressed, as there are frankly lots of books out there about the power of simplicity.  But Greg goes beyond what I have seen from any other book with a similar message (although I am a big fan of Matt May's The Laws of Subtraction as well, but that is a different book as it has many short essays, but still has a unified writing and great writing and editing -- in fact Matt's book and Greg's would be a good pair to read together).  

Through Greg's great message, his lovely spare writing style, and by gently leading the reader through his philosophy he shows you what it "disciplined" approach means, looks like, and how to "be it" not just know how to define it  (I loved "the perks of being unavailable," "win big by cutting your losses," and " "select: the power of extreme criteria" in particular).

I was especially interested once I got into the book because one of the major themes of Scaling Up Excellence is that, as although much research shows that we we human beings get dumber, loss will powers, and do each task less well as cognitive load increases, the necessary practices, structures, and rituals that organizations use often make it difficult or impossible for people to perform well (especially as organizations and programs expand).  We do touch on some simlar themes to Greg (we are both big advocates of sleep and taking  breaks!), but we focus more on approaches for redesigning jobs, teams, and organizations, and our focus zeros in on scaling.  

Essentialism is a quick and efficient read, as you would expect given the title, but you learn a lot, and there is something about the book that led me to believe that, despite my general inability to use the word "no" more often than I should for my own good, that this book will help.  Although I couldn't quite resist reading the book, doing the blurb, and writing this little post! 

My blurb:

“Essentialism is a powerful antidote to the current craziness that plagues our organizations and our lives.  Read Greg McKeown’s words slowly, stop and think about how to apply them to your life – you will do less, do it better, and begin to feel the insanity start to slip away.” 

During the seven years that Huggy Rao and I worked on Scaling Up Excellence, we got involved in some pretty unusual situations – at least for two rather staid old professors. We did everything from working with a company that was trying to improve the (terrible) customer experience in their chain of budget gas stations (I guess things were supposed to get better through magic, as they rejected any suggestion that took time or money) to the incredibly time-consuming but strangely satisfying process we went through to get a book cover design that we liked (that is fodder for another post – we went through many, many prototypes).

The sequence produced in the above picture was among the most amusing and (I confess) mot diagnostic of how difficult and picky I can be to work with AND how gracious, patient, and curious Huggy was and remains. My compulsiveness is, I think, often helpful when writing a book, as the process requires numerous iterations and constant editing. One of my favorite lines about writing comes from Aldous Huxley: "All my thoughts are second thoughts." That is me.  Or, more precisely, all my thoughts are third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. I revise text so much that this compulsion led to some admittedly absurd situations. I don’t think that Huggy fully understood why he had to call me from Iceland to spend 30 minutes talking about two sentences in the draft that I didn't like, but he did so with good humor and as usual made inspired suggestions.

To return to the pictures, we already had plenty of photos of the two of us, but given how I am about pretty much everything, I insisted that we not settle for something easy or second rate or boring, that we do something interesting for the jacket photo. I immediately thought ofClaudia Goetzelmann, who, some seven years earlier, when I first started my blog Work Matters, took that weird and wonderful picture of me next to that “thinker” statue at The New Guinea Sculpture Garden at Stanford that has been at the top of this blog since the I first started (thanks to Diego Rodriguez of Metacool fame.) That crazy first above was all Claudia’s idea. Once she saw that statue, something went off in her brain and she took picture after picture of me in various odd poses with that statue.

This time, Claudia asked if, before she took the pictures, if she could scout out nearby locations. We wrongly assumed the location would actually be on the Stanford campus and would be be something rather traditional and academic – standing in front of books, teaching a room full of students, or perhaps a shot of us in serious scholarly conversation. That is not quite how Claudia’s mind works. She decided, after driving around for several hours, that the best light in the afternoon was next to the Dumbarton Bridge that connects the lower San Francisco Peninsula to the East Bay – a pretty weird location, we thought, as it was a good 20 minutes from Stanford – there were no academic trappings, just a grassy sandy marsh, the bay, and a big bridge packed with noisy smelly traffic. (Indeed, see Diego's latest post. Claudia is a spoon bender of the best kind). 

Claudia also wrote and asked if she could spend 30 bucks on two picture frames as she thought that they would make for an interesting picture. I thought she was nuts, The idea of jamming our heads together in a frame did not seem becoming of two serious scholars like us, but I did not want to interfere with the creative process. When we saw them, we started laughing. Then we really started giggling when we saw that Claudia had hired a make-up artist to “touch you up.” It didn’t seem to us as if make-up would help us look any younger or prettier. But we remembered Richard Nixon shiny head and sweaty lip fiasco after he refused make-up when he debated John Kennedy on TV in the 1960s, so we both agreed to accept a bit of powder and lip goo of some kind.

Claudia was so energetic and encouraging that the experience was really fun. I think we had been laughing nonstop for an hour by the time she took the above picture – her favorite after taking perhaps 1000 pictures of us in various poses (at least 100 with us actually standing up against the bridge wall). When we arrived, we were in coats and ties – Claudia humored us and took some pictures, but soon had us remove them because they made us look too boring.

As a result of Claudia’s imagination, skill, and infectious enthusiasm, the book jacket will have a picture we love. I doubt it will help sell any books. It might even drive people away who decide that two guys in a crooked picture frame (and who look like they are about to dissolve into laughter) couldn't possibly write a rigorous and relevant book on scaling or any other business topic. But, for us, the picture feels right because it symbolizes so much about the seven year “adventure” that led to Scaling Up Excellence. We both were willing to try something weird that made us a bit uncomfortable, I pushed for a compulsive, time consuming, and arguably unnecessary solution that required trying a lot of ideas and throwing most away, Huggy was patient and bemused throughout (even when most sane people would tell me to bug off), and we had good fun.

So that is how we ended up with that crazy picture. We hope you like it.

Note: This first appeared on LinkedIN in one of my "Influencer" columns.  I edited it slightly.