The Agile Scaleup

Great Scoreboard; Reward A-Players; Moon-Shot Questions; Philly SMP

Dear ScaleUps, 

Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights/opportunities to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.

ScaleUp Summit Anaheim --
Join the largest gathering of executives leading scaleups - along with a dozen+ authors of the top business books to outlearn the competition - and have some fun. Ben Horowitz, Chip Conley, David Meerman Scott, John DiJulius, Robert Glazer, Alden Mills, Mark Divine, Santiago Jaramillo, and the infamous Molly Bloom (of the movie Molly’s Game fame) and more.  We’ll host a fun casino party in Molly’s honor with the band Policed. And I’ll be leading an optional half-day Scaling Up workshop included in the registration price. Executive education is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s the single highest ROI of any marginal dollar invested - and the Summit is like reading a dozen biz books, the pace of A-player execs. See you in Anaheim Oct 15 – 17. 

Red Balloon’s Latest BHAG and Scoreboard --
In 2005 Red Balloon founder Naomi Simson, having sold just 7500 experiences, set a BHAG to sell 2 million experiences (representing 10% of Australia’s population) by 2015.Equally important, she put up a big scoreboard and tracked it real time. Results? Her team achieved the BHAG two years early, in 2013. Her latest BHAG is based around “velocity of experiences served” with the goal being 1 per second! Currently they are at 1 per 49 seconds. Are you tracking your BHAG real time? Posted on big scoreboards? 

6 Questions Before Launching a Moon-Shot Project --
This HBR article uses Jeff Bezos’s space ambitions to demonstrate six questions to evaluate the likely success of a significant project. Notes the authors:

We have come to realize that the success of a project largely depends on six questions. Six simple, straightforward, yes-or-no questions. Below, we’ll apply them to Bezos’s space ambitions to analyze and assess the likelihood of his moon shot’s succeeding (literally and figuratively). As you read, apply these questions to your own moon shot projects and make your own assessment.

Not surprising, the six questions are summarized as Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why - the same that have driven the One-Page Strategic Plan for almost two decades. And we would add “should or shouldn’t” - a core values/ethical question Anyway, the more detailed questions in the article are excellent and serve as a quick way to evaluate your ambitious projects. I have a new moon-shot project to bring together the owners of sports team in the US and Europe and using these 6 questions during a key meeting today to assess the likely success - stay tuned. Thanks to Steve Hall for sharing.

Rewarding A-Players --
Our 180+ coaching partners participate in a Yammer channel where they support each other in coaching you. This week one of the partners posted “A client has asked how she should better understand the drivers/motivations of her A-Players and appropriately reward them to inspire and retain that valuable talent. Interested in what others have done.” Another partner responded with an excellent list:

• Provide them with stretching assignments, challenges and projects.
• Ensure that they have a line manager/ leader as their Boss/ Coach. Nothing pisses off A players more than having a poor boss
• Remove C players from the team. Again, nothing frustrates A players more than having to put up with DoDos
• Provide regular coaching and 1-2-1s. Ensure that they have a clear progression route to grow up through the company
• Provide them with ongoing business education. Gazelles Growth Institute is great for this and you can set up specific pathways.
• Take the time to recognize their efforts and thank them for their contribution. Employee recognition is one of the key facets of employee engagement.
• Conduct a strengths finder exercise and ensure that they are in a role that plays to these strengths.
• Make sure that you are removing all the barriers that are preventing them from doing their job.
• Ensure that you are rewarding them with the right remuneration for the results that they are achieving

ScaleUp Masters’ Program (SMP) Coming to Philadelphia --
Feb 24 - 26 is the kickoff of our next SMP. It’s an opportunity for five firms to coming together quarterly for a year to master the tools/techniques of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0).  The program integrates all our offerings - coaching, learning, and our technology platform that gives you a real time scoreboard to drive execution. For more information go to this link.

CEO-BOOTCAMP: spend 3.5 days with Verne, serial entrepreneur John Ratliff, and 6 other CEOs in a beautiful retreat setting, addressing the constraints holding back you, your business, and your industry. Jan 14 - 17; Jan 21 - 24; Mar 10 - 13, 2020.

EXITING: Looking to sell the business in the next 18 to 36 months? Want to avoid the traps many sellers fall into with today's buyers? You can download the white paper Seven Traps Sophisticated Buyers Deploy Against Unwary Sellers from align5 advisors here

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? The Scaling Up team is prepared to support you. We have helped 40,000 other organizations over the past 30+ years, in scaling up their organizations through coaching, workshops, online training and more. 

We would like to offer you a complimentary, personal follow-up from our Scaling Up team to share how we can support you in scaling your organization.

YES! I WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COACHING & RECEIVE A COMPLIMENTARY FOLLOW-UP (CLICK HERE)

For questions or more information contact us at [email protected]

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability - Drive Execution with Align, cloud-based software designed to scale up your Rockefeller Habits implementation. www.alignwithscalingup.com - on your computer, tablet or phone. Click here to watch an introductory video.

Better Book Club -- What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.

Ben Horowitz; Tim Ferriss; Significant BRT Statement; Two Webinars

Dear ScaleUps, 

Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights/opportunities to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.

Leading Two Webinars Next Week --
Aug 27 2pm – 3pm ET I’ll be with Emplify’s founder/CEO Santiago Jaramillo (keynoting our Summit) to discuss 5 strategies for employee engagement. Aug 28, 1pm ET, I’ll share the top 3 Barriers to Scaling Up.

VC Ben Horowitz’s New Book --
Following on his huge bestseller The Hard Thing About Hard Things (hope you read) venture capitalist Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz fame and co-founder of LoudCloud, which he took public, has a new book coming out this fall called What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture Hardcover. Reserve your copy now. And we’re thrilled that Ben is keynoting our upcoming ScaleUp Summit along with a dozen other top biz thought leaders and authors - Oct 15 - 17, Anaheim. A chance for your team to meet a thousand other leaders of scaleups and immerse yourself in the latest executive education powering the top scaleups in the world. Outlearn your competition.

This from Tim Ferriss - “Email policy I’m still using and benefiting from” --
I remain a huge fan of Tim’s “5 Bullet Friday” blog. This is from his blog last Friday and aligns with a preference I’ve expressed within our own firm:

Five.sentenc.es. “Five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.” Here is an example text to place in your signature: “Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es.” I discovered this ages ago in a guest post from Leo Babauta. As he wrote, “I limit myself to five sentences for each reply (at the maximum - many replies are even shorter). That forces me to be concise, to choose only the essentials of what I want to say, and limits the time I spend replying to email. Keep them short, but powerful.”

One Topic Per Email and Subject Line Matches --
In addition, I prefer just one-topic per email with a Subject line that matches the message. This way you can easily forward/connect people that need to help address the email. And if sent an email with more than one topic/request, reply to each separately, changing the subject line to reflect the specific topic.

Significant Business Roundtable Announcement --
It’s been all over the biz news this week - 181 CEOs, members of the Business Roundtable, signed a joint statement saying that corporations should no longer value shareholder profit above all. This Fortune article details the 300-word statement by some of the world’s top CEOs. In essence, corporations should balance the needs of customers, employees, suppliers, and communities with that of shareholders. Duh!

Harvard’s Dr. John Kotter Discovered This 30 Year Ago --
Balancing the needs of employees, customers, and shareholders has been at the center of Scaling Up/Rockefeller Habits from the beginning. And this was based on the landmark research done by my friend Dr. John Kotter at Harvard. In an 11-year study of 200 blue chip firms spanning 22 industries, he found that companies which equally balanced the needs of these three stakeholders wildly outperformed (by over 700%) those firms that put “customers first” or “employees first” or “shareholders first.” This was documented in Dr. Kotter’s classic book Corporate Culture and Performance published in 1992. I had just launched the MIT “Birthing of Giants” program and I put his research at the epi-center of our teachings. It seems practical ideas take decades to enter the mainstream - happy large corporations are finally catching up!

CEO-BOOTCAMP: spend 3.5 days with Verne, serial entrepreneur John Ratliff, and 6 other CEOs in a beautiful retreat setting, addressing the constraints holding back you, your business, and your industry. Aug 20 - 23, 2019 (Sold Out); Jan 14 - 17; Jan 21 - 24; Mar 10 - 13, 2020.

EXITING: Looking to sell the business in the next 18 to 36 months? Want to avoid the traps many sellers fall into with today's buyers? You can download the white paper Seven Traps Sophisticated Buyers Deploy Against Unwary Sellers from align5 advisors here

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? The Scaling Up team is prepared to support you. We have helped 40,000 other organizations over the past 30+ years, in scaling up their organizations through coaching, workshops, online training and more. 

We would like to offer you a complimentary, personal follow-up from our Scaling Up team to share how we can support you in scaling your organization.

YES! I WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COACHING & RECEIVE A COMPLIMENTARY FOLLOW-UP (CLICK HERE)

For questions or more information contact us at [email protected]

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability - Drive Execution with Align, cloud-based software designed to scale up your Rockefeller Habits implementation. www.alignwithscalingup.com - on your computer, tablet or phone. Click here to watch an introductory video.

Better Book Club -- What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.

Email Mistake; Saban’s Advice; Walmart’s Response; AMC’s Record Results

Dear ScaleUps, 

Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights/opportunities to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.

Mediocre people don’t like high-achievers - & high-achievers don’t like mediocre people.
	Coach Nick Saban

$2.99 Kindle Version - Steve Mariotti
Favor?  If you’ve received at least $2.99 of value from my insights; if you think youth entrepreneurship education is worthy; and if you believe school teachers are important - please support my dear friend Steve Mariotti’s new book Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement. Steve founded NFTE, teaching entrepreneurship around the world to inner city youth. It’s a fun story and worth $2.99 to support Steve!  Please purchase or gift to someone - maybe a school teacher - thank you.

Happiness vs. Engagement --
It’s a critical distinction and one Santiago Jaramillo, founder of Emplify (a SaaS tool for measuring and managing employee engagement), details in his book Agile Engagement: How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture. Go right to Chapter 2 and understand that happy employees aren’t necessarily engaged and acting in the best interests of the organization. SPro and book club members will receive a copy of Santiago’s book - then come hear him and a dozen more biz thought leaders keynote our fall ScaleUp Summit in Anaheim Oct 15 - 16.

Walmart CEO’s Instagram Post --
It’s instructive to see how biz leaders respond in a crisis. Here’s Yahoo Finances’ post highlighting Walmart CEO Doug McMillon’s response to the shootings at their El Paso store. He notes “we’re a learning organization” and he promises to be “thoughtful and deliberate” in their decisions arising from this tragic act of violence.

Was Email a Mistake? - A Case for the Daily Huddle
This New Yorker magazine article by past Summit keynoter Cal Newport traces the history of asynchronous communication starting with the “tubes” at CIA headquarters. In short, what organizations are discovering is that email is a terrible way to address challenges and solve problems. Notes Cal:

Recently, the founder and C.E.O. of a publicly traded technology company told me that he spends at most two or three hours a week sending and receiving e-mails; he has replaced most of his asynchronous messaging with a “regular rhythm” of meetings, which allows him to efficiently address issues in real time. “If you keep needing to send me urgent messages, then my assumption is that there’s something broken about the way you’re doing business,” he said.

Cal goes on to describe how Silicon Valley discovered the power of a daily huddle:

The idea that a quarter of an hour of structured synchrony is enough time to enable a full day of work might sound preposterous, but, for more than twelve million software developers, it seems to be working.

Bingo! The Scaling Up daily huddle brings the power of this synchronous communication to the entire organization - something our competitors dismiss as too difficult to implement, thus allowing organizations to leave massive amounts of money and time on the table. A regular “meeting rhythm” has been at the heart of our performance platform from the beginning and will be forever - humans were designed to talk.

No Bad Industries; Just Bad Leadership --
In an industry which saw revenue drop almost 4% this past quarter, AMC Theatres, based out of Kansas City, saw revenue jump over 4%, profits 122%, and record-setting attendance according to this Forbes article. Not surprising to me given I spent over $150 last night taking my three sons to the movies (dine-in) to celebrate my youngest son’s 12^th birthday. And because I’m a member of AMC’s loyalty program, I don’t even think to go to any other theatre. Lesson? There are no bad industries; just bad leadership. Hope you’re leading your industry or give us a call!

Nick Saban on “A” Players --
The famed college football coach Nick Saban, in this 1-minute Facebook post, makes a great case for having all A Players on your team. His advice includes the quote above. Thank you, John DiJulius, customer service guru, for sharing this link with me when my sons and I visited his family this week outside of Cleveland.

CEO-BOOTCAMP: spend 3.5 days with Verne, serial entrepreneur John Ratliff, and 6 other CEOs in a beautiful retreat setting, addressing the constraints holding back you, your business, and your industry. Aug 20 - 23, 2019 (Sold Out); Jan 14 - 17; Jan 21 - 24; Mar 10 - 13, 2020.

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? The Scaling Up team is prepared to support you. We have helped 40,000 other organizations over the past 30+ years, in scaling up their organizations through coaching, workshops, online training and more. 

We would like to offer you a complimentary, personal follow-up from our Scaling Up team to share how we can support you in scaling your organization.

YES! I WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COACHING & RECEIVE A COMPLIMENTARY FOLLOW-UP (CLICK HERE)

For questions or more information contact us at [email protected]

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability - Drive Execution with Align, cloud-based software designed to scale up your Rockefeller Habits implementation. www.alignwithscalingup.com - on your computer, tablet or phone. Click here to watch an introductory video.

Better Book Club -- What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.

Soul Dies; “Warbers”; Best Biz Dev; Want Industry Attention?

Dear ScaleUps, 

Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights/opportunities to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.

Soul of a ScaleUp - 3 Keys --
This July HBR article by Harvard Prof Ranjay Gulati, though titled for startups, captures perfectly the three things his research found drive the “soul” of an organization:

1. Business Intent - how do you plan “to make history” (great question)
2. Customer Connection - Nike’s Ekins gathered customer insights and fed back to HQ
3. Employee Experience - less about “fun” and more about giving “voice” and “choice”

Though these might not seem novel, I really like how Gulati frames each in the article – using plain language (like voice and choice) and examples. It’s worth 2-minutes to read and then ask “are we doing these three simple things” in our company? 

How the Organization’s Soul Dies --
Gulati goes on to detail how a vibrant soul ends up dying inside the organization.  He acknowledges that as companies scale they need to add discipline and systems.  However, if not done carefully…

…there is a danger that added bureaucracy and “new blood” will cause workers to feel stifled, customers to feel disconnected, and an organization’s entrepreneurial flair to disappear. I interviewed several seasoned “growth stage” CEOs who’d been brought in to replace the founders of companies and who, despite the best of intentions, quickly squelched the spirit of those enterprises.

Gulati concludes by sharing how to “Preserve the Soul” with concrete ways Warby Parker (using “Warbers”) and Netflix did just this.  It’s a well written article worth the time to read.  Thank you to Susan Packard, founder of HGTV and author of Fully Human (keynoted our last Summit), for alerting me to this article. 

Customers, not Technologies, Disrupt Markets --
I’m jumping up and down -- I love when a book/article discerns a key insight different from the norm. In this HBR article, Thales S. Teixeira, author of Unlocking the Customer Value Chain, shares a fantastic insight:

Disruptive startups enter markets not by stealing customers from incumbents, but by stealing a select few customer activities (emphasis added). And the activities disruptors choose to take away from incumbents are precisely the ones that customers are not satisfied with.

Please read that paragraph again and again – it’s at the “activity” level (where Michael Porter says differentiation happens) that disruption occurs. Find out what activities within an industry/service are driving customers crazy and fix those!!! Please read this article for the extensive list of examples. Thank you, Steve Hall, for sharing.

9 Best Biz Dev Books --
This is a little dated (May 2019), but I like both Benzinga’s list of top business development books and how this online publication summarizes each below the list. And several are industry focused – biz dev for law firms, biz dev for professional service firms, etc.

Most Interesting Obscure/Insightful “Fact” for the Weekend --
Things are not always as they appear. Why do most Egyptian sculptures have broken noses? Seems they were damaged on purpose. Sculptures were not art; they were representative of a specific person/tribe. What every part was damaged indicated what power they wanted to take from that person’s spirit i.e. grave robbers would break off the nose of the sculpture (representing breath) to “kill” the spirit so it wouldn’t haunt them. If the left arm was broken off, that prevented the spirit from giving; and if the right hand was broken off that prevented the spirit from receiving alms. This article provides more details, but now you know!!

Want Positive Attention in Your Industry? --
Involved in your trade association? I enjoy keynoting these industry-driven events and having you introduce me on stage. I generally rate highly and I’m able to incorporate one of your best practices in my presentation - giving you broader visibility (and kudos) among your peers. Email me [email protected] if I can help. 

CEO-BOOTCAMP: spend 3.5 days with Verne, serial entrepreneur John Ratliff, and 6 other CEOs in a beautiful retreat setting, addressing the constraints holding back you, your business, and your industry. Aug 20 - 23, 2019 (Sold Out); Jan 14 - 17; Jan 21 - 24; Mar 10 - 13, 2020.

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? The Scaling Up team is prepared to support you. We have helped 40,000 other organizations over the past 30+ years, in scaling up their organizations through coaching, workshops, online training and more. 

We would like to offer you a complimentary, personal follow-up from our Scaling Up team to share how we can support you in scaling your organization.

YES! I WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT COACHING & RECEIVE A COMPLIMENTARY FOLLOW-UP (CLICK HERE)

For questions or more information contact us at [email protected]

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability - Drive Execution with Align, cloud-based software designed to scale up your Rockefeller Habits implementation. www.alignwithscalingup.com - on your computer, tablet or phone. Click here to watch an introductory video.

Better Book Club -- What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.