The DNA of Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence – Getting More Without Settling for Less – Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rau (Crown Business)

Think about your business. Are there pockets of excellence, departments or sections of your business that perform at a higher level, deliver better results and just seem to get it? You’ve tried everything short of cloning to try to duplicate those outcomes only to come up short?

It was that frustration that was at the genesis of a seven year search for answers conducted by a pair of Stanford professors on a quest if you will, to map the DNA of Excellence. The results come in the form of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting More Without Settling for Less from Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rau.

 

 

While Sutton and Rau may not have succeeded in drawing up that scientific road map, but they have delivered an important and unique business edition that is based on hard evidence and proven tactics to tackle the challenge of scaling up excellence across an organization.

Sutton and Rau have boiled  scaling excellence down to seven principles:

1. Spread mindset, not just footprint.
2.  Engaging all the senses.
3. Link short-term realities to long-term dreams.
4. Accelerate accountability.
5. Fearing the clusterfug.
6. Scaling requires both addition and subtraction.
7. Slow down to scale faster - and better - down the road. 

They offer useful guidance and examples for a wide variety of business ranging from healthcare to financial sectors and retail and hospitality to social media and web-based businesses.