Dear ScaleUps,
Hope it’s been a productive and purposeful week. Here are some insights/opportunities to help you outlearn/outthink the competition.
Scaling Up Scoreboard® --
Want to increase the number of priorities completed by 3.5x? The newly branded Scaling Up Scoreboard® powered by Align puts your priorities, KPIs, and all the Scaling Up tools at your fingertips (mobile ready). More below, but first…
The Letter Uber’s Founder Never Sent --
If you read just one thing today (or this weekend), I hope all leaders of scaleups read the letter that Gizmodo reports Travis Kalanick wrote but never sent detailing the mistakes he made in scaling up Uber. We’re always talking about the good, but it’s rare we get a direct glimpse into an entrepreneur openly admitting their faults. The 2000-word letter opens with “Over the last seven years, our company has grown a lot - but it hasn’t grown up.” Please take four minutes to read this incredibly insightful look at the pitfalls facing most scaleups - and possibly discussing at your next weekly meeting. Thank you Scaling Up coach Pelle Tornell for sharing this with me.
What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There --
I was struck, in the letter, by this line of Kalanick “...As we grew, I held on to too many things that helped me survive and build a great company, but at scale became ever-increasing liabilities.” He then goes on to list many of those “things” detailing what he called “organizational debt” which built up because of their rapid growth - one being processes that didn’t scale and another having too many first-time managers. Granted, going from 400 to 14,000 employees in seven years is more growth than 99.9% of us will face, nevertheless the lessons he lists are useful to review from your own organizational context. Again, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read. At a minimum, I found it powerful that Kalanick wrote the letter if for no other reason than to clear his head as he was facing a series of major challenges, both personal and professional.
WeWork’s Founder Out as Well – So How Did He Scale?
This Fortune article details the reasons WeWork founder Adam Neumann was forced out of his CEO role this week. What I found insightful was this sentence
“Neumann grew WeWork into a disruptive force within the commercial real estate industry through a blend of branding, marketing, messaging, and design.” For all his failures, the lesson we can all take from WeWork is the importance of branding, marketing, messaging, and design. Imagine, then, if you put these things behind a winning business model! These are four powerful topics for your ongoing one-hour marketing meeting – get to it!!
Fortune’s Most Powerful Women List --
Published this week (with excellent video interviews of each woman – really worth watching), the top five are Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin; Mary Barra, CEO of GM; Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments; Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM; and Gail Boudreaux, CEO of Anthem. Moving up or newly joining include Accenture’s new Global CEO Julie Sweet and Best Buy’s new CEO Corie Barry. Here’s a link to the entire list of 50.
Scaling Up Scoreboard® Whitepaper --
Looking at data from 1900 companies which have created more than 435,000 priorities on our partner dashboarding system called Align -- now white label branded Scaling Up Scoreboard® - the software’s data provides quantitative insights into how successful companies scale up and grow. Using this data, we compiled a whitepaper featuring research that proves you can reduce your timeline for achieving your goals by continuously improving your strategic planning and execution using technology. You can download the whitepaper here.
