Scaling up Excellence

Scaling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It's how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It's how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it's how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn't know how to scale up what is best within it won't achieve long-term success. Bestselling author Robert Sutton and his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao have devoted nearly a decade to uncovering what it takes to create and spread outstanding performance, and in Scaling Up Excellence they share the fruits of their research. Drawing on case studies that range from Silicon Valley enterprises to non-profit organisations, they provide crucial insights into corporate cultures, both good and bad, and offer a road map for establishing and stimulating excellence. In the process, they show how to use 'premortems' when making big decisions about change. They reveal why seven is so often the magic number when it comes to team size.They examine successful and unsuccessful quests for improvement - in hospitals, schools and elsewhere. And they discuss when a single corporate mindset is best ('Catholicism') and when local variation is preferable ('Buddhism'). Scaling Up Excellence is the first management book devoted to what is - or should be - a core priority for every organisation. As such it is destined to become the standard bearer.

Robert I. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School.He is co-founder of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, which he co-directed from 1996 to 2006.Sutton is also co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the new Hasso Planter Institute of Design, a multi-disciplinary program at Stanford that teaches and spreads "design thinking."He is an IDEO Fellow, member of the Institute for the Future's Board Trustees, and a Professor of Organizational Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Hayagreeva Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Morgan Stanley Director for the Center for Leadership Development and Research at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Rao is a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association and the Academy of Management. He was the editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly, the most prestigious peer reviewed organizational theory journal. He also has served as Consulting Editor for American Journal of Sociology, Senior Editor of Organizational Science, and Guest Editor of Academy of Management Review. He will be on the editorial board of American Sociological Review.

"The pair's eagerness drips from every page and it would be a hard-hearted reader who left Scaling Up Excellence anything less than thoroughly energised about the potential for positive change... Very good indeed." -- Robert Jeffery Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development "Practical and spiced with entertaining case studies. They do not shy away, either, from pointing out that it may sometimes make sense to stay small." Financial Times