The full day seminar on November 20th 2014, Mumbai, will address many of the concerns Indian companies face in terms of driving business growth and profitability.
Identify key differences between scaling well and scaling badly
Although the details and daily dramas vary wildly from place to place, the similarities among scaling challenges are more important than the differences.The key choices that leaders face and the principles that help organizations scale up without screwing up are strikingly consistent - whether the task is to grow a Silicon Valley start-up such as Pulse News from four to twenty people, double the number of lawyers at Google, spread best practices for selling beer from the most effective U.S. Budweiser distributors to the rest, open a new KIPP charter school in Washington, D.C., grow the Joie de Vivre hotel chain, open a See’s Candies store in Texas, reduce drug treatment errors in San Francisco area hospitals, or open IKEA stores in China.
Scaling entails more than the Problem of More.
Effective scaling isn’t simply a matter of running up the numbers by replicating the same old magic again and again. It isn’t enough to keep stamping out perfect clones of some original and idealized founding team, franchise, plant, quality effort, innovation process, charter school, or social services program.Whether it happens in a young social media company like Twitter, the rapidly expanding KALAHI poverty program in the Philippines, a chain like Lulu’s in California that opened only three restaurants in its first decade, a ninety-year-old hospital system with fifty thousand employees like the Cleveland Clinic, a massive multinational like Walmart, or a single KFC restaurant in Arkansas, scaling well requires never leaving well enough alone.
People who are adept at scaling excellence talk and act as if they are knee-deep in a manageable mess.
Organizations that scale well are filled with people who talk and act as if they are in the middle of a manageable mess.The principles here can help you spread excellence from the few to the many without screwing up (or at least help you screw up less).
Scaling up on a culture of Innovation
Claudia Kotchka during her seven-year effort to spread innovation practices at Procter & Gamble learnt that 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. 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.. Kotchka 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 her team would have failed to scale if this penchant for action hadn’t been blended with patience and persistence, which her CEO, A. G. Lafley, reminded how important it was again and again. Kotchka’s advice is rem¬iniscent of something a McKinsey consultant - a veteran of the scaling wars says: “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."
Scaling up a chain of low-cost and standardized elementary schools
Shannon May went to China to study economic development. As part of her job, she was required to teach English at a local elementary school. May was appalled by how poorly her fellow teachers understood what they were supposed to teach. She was also disgusted with their lack of attention to students, poor attendance, and penchant for getting drunk during lunch. She learned that horrible schools like that one fueled the cycle of poverty in developing nations throughout the world: an estimated 80 percent of the students they taught never became proficient at reading, writing, or simple arithmetic. May started talking with entrepreneurs Jay Kimmelman and Phil Frei; the trio “wondered why no one was thinking about schools in developing countries the way Starbucks thought about coffee." They soon raised money to start Bridge International Academies, a chain of high-quality, low-cost elementary schools designed to produce well-educated students. In 2009, they opened their first "Academy-in-a-Box" in the Mukuru slum in Nairobi, Kenya. They now operate over 210 schools in three African countries, where parents pay $4 to $10 a month for a highly standardized and exacting education (starting with children as young as three years old) that has chalked up impressive levels of student achievement, given hope to parents that their children can escape from grinding poverty, and created over two thousand good jobs.
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.
Stacking up Talent isn’t enough:
Hiring right people is crucial for propelling scaling, but it isn’t enough. Unfortunately, too many leaders and gurus believe that, if they just buy the most skilled and motivated employees, the exceptional performances will inevitably follow. They forget that team and organizational effectiveness requires weaving together people with diverse knowledge and skills - not just gathering a lot of talented people. Too many organizations stumble because they devote too little effort to helping people mesh their talents, to developing the skills of employees they hire, and providing incentives that encourage them to pass along the tricks of trade to colleagues and to pitch in to help one another to finish projects.
Scaling starts and ends with individual
Success depends on the will and skill of people at every level of an organization. It isn’t just something that senior executives need to worry about and understand.Even in big companies, the impetus for creating and scaling excellence often doesn’t start at the top. In smart organizations, people know that, although excellence might not be everywhere, it can start and spread from anywhere.
He will also cover many of the following issues with enough anecdotes, cases, examples and frameworks that were evolved out of 7 years of actual work.
- Why bad is stronger than good. They show that scaling depends on clearing away destructive beliefs and behaviors o that effectiveness can spread and stick
- Why navigating the "Buddhism-Catholic continuum" is essential to effective scaling
- Why oversized teams are among the biggest impediments to effective scaling.
- Why scaling depends on "connecting people and cascading excellence" and how this process has this process has been used to spread innovations in the U.S. army and at Facebook
- Why it is so difficult for most people to link their daily actions to their organization’s long term scaling goals and how to make it happen despite the obstacles.
