This is reprinted from the Harvard Business Review site. I posted it there last week.  A big thanks to Julia Kirby for the wonderful editing.

Start talking about the challenge of “scaling” with people, and
you’ll find the term gets used to mean a lot of different things. For
example, when entrepreneurs talk about it, they are usually struggling
with matters of organization. Take Citrus Lane
CEO Mauria Finley, whose company was experiencing some growing pains,
appropriately enough; the startup sends monthly packages of great baby
products to moms. After raising $5.1 million in capital in 2012, it grew
from 6 to 20 employees.

Back in 2011, in Citrus Lane’s first six months, its small founding
team worked in a house and ate lunch together every day around a big
table. Any problem or opportunity that arose was dealt with right then
and there, lest misunderstandings fester or business prospects slip
away. Growing to 20 people working in a more traditional office setting
did not strike anyone as extreme change, yet the team found it had to
work a lot harder to unearth problems and opportunities. Even more
tricky, they had to learn to articulate something that had been tacit: a
shared understanding of goals, culture, and what it takes to succeed at
Citrus Lane. Today, they constantly remind each other to spend time
with newcomers and, as Finley emphasized, not just tell them these
things when they are hired or remind them a few times. The scaled-up
organization needs to hear about what matters most at Citrus Lane over
and over, to live these beliefs every day, and to observe her and other
leaders living them, as well. Deliberate effort is required because “it
isn’t something that just happens naturally at lunch every day any
longer. We are too big now.”

A growing employee base represents one type of scaling challenge.
Since my Stanford colleague Huggy Rao and I decided several years ago to
study scaling (it’s the topic of our forthcoming book Scaling Up Excellence),
we have heard about many others – so many that we thought, early on,
that we might need to put a finer point on which form we hoped to shed
light on.

For example, when leaders of much larger organizations talk about
scaling, they’re often talking about something more akin to replication.
In a 2001 interview with HBR, UPS’s then CEO Jim Kelly described the
growth of the company: “For decades, we’ve been able to grow
tremendously simply by expanding our core business geographically.
Really, UPS’s first 75 years was spent expanding across the United
States: first to 13 states, then to nine additional states, and so
forth. We just took our core delivery business and applied for rights in
different states.” Today that kind of marketplace scaling often means a
more complicated process of global expansion– such as IKEA’s opening
stores in China, or Home Depot’s failed efforts to do so.

And then there are the organizational leaders who use the term
scaling to describe their desire to find pockets of excellence in
behaviors and beliefs in the organization and spread them further – a
different challenge than adding new people and locations. We studied how
Wyeth, the large Pharmaceutical firm (now part of Pfizer) made dramatic
improvements in cost and quality across its manufacturing operation. It
first created pockets of excellence in a few small teams in each of
eight plants (calling them “mini-transformations”) and then relied on
mentoring and coaching to spread the superior practices throughout each
plant, from one team to the next.

Still another variation on scaling is when better practices are
transferred across networks of organizations. Between 2004 and 2006, for
example, a Boston-based nonprofit called the Institute for Health Improvement
led an effort called the “100,000 Lives Campaign” to raise awareness in
U.S. hospitals of the importance of some simple practices (e.g., more
frequent and thorough hand-washing) in reducing infection rates.
Ultimately, some 3200 hospitals comprising over 70% of U.S. beds
participated in the Campaign. There is compelling evidence (including
analysis done by members of a Stanford doctoral seminar that Huggy Rao
ran about five years ago) that the number of preventable deaths in U.S
dropped by about 120,000 during this period. (Other factors probably
contributed to that decrease, but the Campaign clearly played a large
role.)

In each of these situations, “scaling” refers to something different.
But as we dug deeper into these and other cases, academic studies, and
stories, we realized what they shared. Scaling challenges nearly always
come down to the same problem: the difficulty of spreading something
good from those who have it to those that don’t – or at least don’t yet.
It is always, in other words, the problem of more.

Finley and her team face the problem of more – and the success of her
growing organization depends on solving it. The need for more of what
was working well also challenged Wyeth, IKEA, and the Institute for
Health Improvement. Have their successful efforts come from the same
mold in terms of what they are spreading and by what method? No – and
yet, we are finding a great deal of commonality in the obstacles that
arise and the decisions that must be made. We’ve discovered guiding
principles that turn out to apply as other leaders and teams go about
building and uncovering pockets of exemplary performance, and spreading
those splendid deeds.

Sometimes the way to learn more about a subject is to focus in more
tightly and become more precise in one’s use of language. But sometimes
the challenge itself is big enough – like the basic problem of spreading
something good to more people and places without screwing up – that it
doesn’t help to narrow its definition. Sometimes, even with the use of a
word, it’s better to scale it up