The Agile Scaleup

2 Fire Questions; Bad Family Analogy; Businessperson of the Year; Bill Gates

Dear ScaleUps, 

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

Lead from the back and let others believe they are in front.
	Nelson Mandela as quoted in Fortune

Should They Stay or Should They Go? 2 Questions --
A family business was having problems with an external Managing Director until our Scaling Up Certified coach Omar Hikal convinced the chairman to let him go, which resolved many of the issues the company was facing. Omar used the two “if you’re not sure” questions:

1. How would you feel if they quit tomorrow?
2. What if you had 10 of them?

Omar (who will join me in working with YPO Egypt this week), thank you for sharing these questions – and for doing your job as a coach and helping this family “face the brutal facts” in a Socratic way.

Stop Saying Your Company is Like a Family --
Author Denise Lee Yohn makes a serious case for not referring to your company/employees as family. Instead, she suggests in this Forbes article that a better analogy is a professional sports team where the CEO is the coach. Please take two minutes to scan the article for the nicely bulleted reasons why the family analogy is dangerous and ill-fitting – and the second bulleted list of why a sports team analogy is better, with some important caveats.

Fusing CX and EX --
Denise Lee Yohn also keynoted our ScaleUp Summit last year (one of the highest rated) as author of Fusion – focused on how to align your brand and culture. Your brand doesn't just represent your organization outwardly--it should represent it inwardly as well. Growth Institute just released Denise Lee Yohn's Learning Suite The FUSION Formula as part of their library of short (roughly 1 hour) seminars. This is the seminar I had my client Mynd watch prior to our last session together. Learn to make your brand an intrinsic part of what your employees live. Check it out through a free 14-day trial of the Scaling Up Club by clicking here!

Businessperson of the Year --
Anything but a popularity contest, Fortune’s editors crunch 10 financial factors then look for leaders who “tackled audacious goals, overcame impossible odds, found creative solutions.” And this year’s new Businessperson of the Year is Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Please take 1 minute to read the incredible outcomes and approach Nadella has used (hint, delegation) to drive Microsoft to over $1 trillion in market cap – lessons for all of us. Go here for the complete list of 20 including #2 Elizabeth Gaines.

Bill Gates Wealthiest --
Do you want to be king or do you want to be rich (former Harvard prof Noam Wasserman question)? Kudos to Bill Gates for delegating the CEO position to Satya Nadella. Earlier this week Gates ($110 billion) once again overtook Jeff Bezos for the top spot.

Thank You Ian Kinnery, Scaling Up Certified UK Coach,…
…for sending me the quote I used to open this weekly insight.

 

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. Dec 3 - 6, 2019; Jan 14 - 17; Mar 10 - 13; Jul 21 - 24; Aug 18 - 21, 2020.

ORDER a BOX of 20 SCALING UP BOOKS --
Want to save 50% over the price on Amazon? Go to this link. 

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

Write Your Own Book --
Whether you want to make it to the bestseller lists or just sell a lot more of your goods or services, with a profound competitive edge over the competition, Book The Business: How to Make BIG Money With Your Book Without Selling a Single Copy is for you!

Request your free copy of this ground-breaking book at advantagefamily.com/scalingup.

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:

Execute Scaling Up Faster and Drive Accountability -- Drive Execution with Scaling Up Scoreboard, the official software tool for implementing Scaling Up – available online and in a mobile app. The technology behind Scaling Up Scoreboard is proven to help you achieve 3.5x more goals. Learn more at https://scalingup.com/software/ - on your computer, tablet or phone.

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.

Egen’s 5; What is FGF; Telecom Ripoff; Bloomberg Keynote; Anton Passed

Dear ScaleUps, 

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

“If companies are winning new customers, the team get new opportunities (and) that is what is going to create a great culture.”
	Raghu Potini, Egen

Latest ScaleUp News --
5 Strategies for Scaling Rapidly; Strategic Insights for Scaling (Verne interviews 3 UK Entrepreneurs at Bloomberg Summit); 10 Deep Tech Scaleups – this news and more at ScaleUps.com, your one-stop weekly update. 

Raghu Potini’s Egen --
Founded in 2009, Raghu Potini has scaled Chicago-area cloud-based developer Egen to over $50 million and 300 employees, making the Inc. 5000 list multiple times. Believing strategy drives culture (vs. culture eating strategy!), this 1-minute article highlights the 5 strategies Potini uses to continue scaling rapidly as Egen wins best places to work awards and creates award-winning data technology solutions, including our well-received conference app we use at our ScaleUp Summits. Are you doing the same 5?

My Bloomberg Breakaway Presentation in London --
This week I co-hosted Bloomberg’s Breakaway CEO Summit in London with Bloomberg TV anchor Carol Massar. It included a 24-minute keynote where I highlight some important pricing examples and resources. Grab your favorite beverage this weekend and hear my latest ideas for scaling. I include mention of a recent HBR article on the importance of “Good, Better, Best” pricing, something Dell EMC is utilizing to drive a 3x in after sale services.

Tom Kandris’ title FGF --
After co-founding and scaling PackageOne to $60 million and exiting in 2017, Tom Kandris is now an angel investor and mentor to other entrepreneurs. I recently met Tom, a fan of Scaling Up, and loved the title on his business card – FGF – Fairy God Father! He says his job is to help good people make their dreams come true!! Thanks for paying it forward, Tom.

Higher Costs, Worse Service – Telecommunications, etc. --
Sick of the poor telecom service I get from Verizon (and AT&T before them), I wrote my Congressman last week to suggest it’s time government intervenes in these oligopolies since the service is better around the rest of the world. Shortly after, the NY Times published this piece titled “Big Business is Overcharging You $5000 per Year” that provides data that supports my experience. Notes the article:

The irony is that Europe is implementing market-based ideas - like telecommunications deregulation and low-cost airlines - that Americans helped pioneer. “E.U. consumers are better off than American consumers today,” Philippon writes, “because the E.U. has adopted the U.S. playbook, which the U.S. itself has abandoned.”

In short, people in the US are paying more and getting worse service than the rest of the world – and I know it impacts my productivity. As Tom Peters shared years ago, if we don’t complain, nothing will get fixed.  Call your carrier and Congress person.

Correct Link for Kanban Video --
My apologies – last week I supplied the wrong link to Paul Akers’ Kanban process improvement video (the quickest and most complete I’ve seen). Note – mid-market firms are less than a third efficient as the Fortune 500 in generating revenue/employee. One reason is weak processes. Here is the correct link to Paul’s excellent video.

Additional Correction – Anton Kuraia Died
Though he beat the odds and lived 2 years beyond what the doctors projected using IV C, he did succumb to his cancer and died in 2017. The link I was given is dated a few months ago, but my bad for not doing more research as did Gerard Vroomen who noted my error. Rough week last week for reporting. Thank you Gerard (and my followers) for contributing.

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. Dec 3 - 6, 2019; Jan 14 - 17; Mar 10 - 13; Jul 21 - 24; Aug 18 - 21, 2020.

ORDER a BOX of 20 SCALING UP BOOKS --
Want to save 50% over the price on Amazon? Go to this link. 

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
 

Write Your Own Book --
Whether you want to make it to the bestseller lists or just sell a lot more of your goods or services, with a profound competitive edge over the competition, Book The Business: How to Make BIG Money With Your Book Without Selling a Single Copy is for you!

Request your free copy of this ground-breaking book at advantagefamily.com/scalingup.

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:

Execute Scaling Up Faster and Drive Accountability -- Drive Execution with Scaling Up Scoreboard, the official software tool for implementing Scaling Up – available online and in a mobile app. The technology behind Scaling Up Scoreboard is proven to help you achieve 3.5x more goals. Learn more at https://scalingup.com/software/ - on your computer, tablet or phone.

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.

4-Day Workweek Works; Kanban FastCap Style; Deal on SEALFIT Training

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

Amazing (free) video. This is the PERFECT tutorial for any company wishing to implement a Kanban system. You don't need anything else.
	Bruce Ennis, BE Quality

Latest ScaleUp News --
10 German Scaleups; Investment in European Scaleups Quadruples; India-based Delhivery Using Electric Vehicles and Drones – this news and more at ScaleUps.com, your one-stop weekly update.

Kanban Paul Aker/FastCap Style – Great for COOs
Need better workflow management? Want to emulate a system that effectively drives agile software development teams? Toyota’s Kanban system is a workflow management method designed to help visualize work, maximize efficiency and be agile. In this 19-minute video 2-Second Lean author and entrepreneur Paul Aker teaches Kanban and how he uses it at his company – especially perfect for any head of operations – and a system all leaders should be knowledgeable of – some excellent weekend learning.

Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan…--
…and productivity jumped 40%. This CNN piece also highlights how Microsoft encouraged shorter meetings (30 minutes) and less time answering emails. Shake Shack is testing something similar as are many smaller firms. One huge benefit if people had more 3-day weekends -- a boost to consumer spending! 

SEALFIT Training – Unbeatable Mind --
Mark Divine, author of Way of the SEAL, has put together a package for the immersive “Unbeatable Mind Experience” in Carlsbad, California, to include a complimentary membership to the online Unbeatable Mind Academy and a signed copy of his latest book Staring Down the Wolf. Ideally, you would do this WITH your core team... but you would also benefit greatly by doing it alone. This training is led by his top coaches and Mark... going deep into their five mountains and the Unbeatable Mind developmental tools he touched on in his keynote at our ScaleUp Summit. Click here to see the details.

IV Vitamin C Saves Another Life in NZ --
Riddled with cancer and given a few weeks to live, Anton Kuraia turned to IV Vitamin C and is alive today – the cancer gone. This 14-minute TVNZ broadcast highlights his case and how science seems to be catching up to this miraculous cure. FYI, New Zealand has been a leader in people using IV Vitamin C to cure various difficult diseases as we learn more about nature’s natural chemo/antibiotic.


Westminster City Council (London) Scaling Up --
The Business and Enterprise team, which is part of the Regeneration and Economic Development service at Westminster City Council, is shown working through their Scaling Up “Vision Summary.” City of Westminster recently co-hosted our ScaleUp Summit as they focus on supporting more scaleups in London. Good to see they are modeling the way, as they work with Scaling Up Certified coach Neale Lewis.

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. Dec 3 - 6, 2019; Jan 14 - 17; Mar 10 - 13; Jul 21 - 24; Aug 18 - 21, 2020.

ORDER a BOX of 20 SCALING UP BOOKS --
Want to save 50% over the price on Amazon? Go to this link. 

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

Write Your Own Book --
Whether you want to make it to the bestseller lists or just sell a lot more of your goods or services, with a profound competitive edge over the competition, Book The Business: How to Make BIG Money With Your Book Without Selling a Single Copy is for you!

Request your free copy of this ground-breaking book at advantagefamily.com/scalingup.

 

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:

Execute Scaling Up Faster and Drive Accountability -- Drive Execution with Scaling Up Scoreboard, the official software tool for implementing Scaling Up – available online and in a mobile app. The technology behind Scaling Up Scoreboard is proven to help you achieve 3.5x more goals. Learn more at https://scalingup.com/software/ - on your computer, tablet or phone.

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.

McKinsey’s CEO Checklist; How Leaders Coach; Elder vs Elderly; Jan 14 – 17 One Seat Left

Dear ScaleUps, 

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

An effective manager-as-coach asks questions instead of providing answers, supports employees instead of judging them, and facilitates their development instead of dictating what has to be done.
	HBR article “The Leader as Coach”

The Worst and Best Halloween Candy --
I agree with the #1 best, but the new #1 worst, no way!!  It’s the first candy I buy and consume!! I just love how this candy site grabs the headlines each year with their newsworthy research – how could you do that each year? What data, when?

CEO Boot Camp January – 1 Seat
Sold out for months, our January 14 – 17 CEO Boot Camp just had a seat open up – one of the CEOs needed to move to our March dates. December has 3 of 7 seats left and March now has just 4 of 7.

McKinsey’s CEO Checklist --
If you’re a CEO, go right to the end of this McKinsey article and look at the concise list of mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs based on 25 years of performance data of 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries. One conclusion?

Whereas Steve Jobs advised college graduates, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” we urge CEOs to “Stay hungry, stay humble.”

At first, I baulked at the list of 18, but Ritz Carlton had 17 gold standards they expected employees to know and abide by, so why not 18 for the CEO! And McKinsey bunched them into 5 categories – the equivalent of people, strategy, execution, board, and community. Again, the chart/checklist at the end of the article is worth printing out and reviewing constantly. 

The Leader as Coach --
…and for the rest of the leadership team, this Nov-Dec HBR article details the pivot managers must make to becoming coaches to their teams. The authors use Microsoft as a case study, describing how and why this company made the change as it moved from a know-it-all culture to a learn-it-all culture. This article digs into the details! It concludes:

We live in a world of flux. Successful executives must increasingly supplement their industry and functional expertise with a general capacity for learning-and they must develop that capacity in the people they supervise. No longer can managers simply command and control. Nor will they succeed by rewarding team members mainly for executing flawlessly on things they already know how to do. Instead, with full institutional support, they need to reinvent themselves as coaches whose job it is to draw energy, creativity, and learning out of the people with whom they work.

Please take 4 minutes to read through this transformation Microsoft made as a model for even us mere mortal companies. Thank you Steve Hall for pointing me to this valuable article.

Modern Day Elder --
Hotelier and now key advisor to Airbnb, Chip Conley's, presentation at the Scale-Up Summit was very popular and resonated deeply. He just launched a daily blog this week called Wisdom Well housed on the Modern Elder Academy website. You can subscribe here to the blog if you'd like it to come to your email daily. And, of course, his book is entitled Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. 

Wisdom@Work is available here
Modern Elder Academy’s new workshops are here

Scaling Up in Chinese (Simplified) --
EO Shanghai and their teams turned out in force to help me launch Scaling Up in Chinese. Thank you to Fred Crosetto and Amelie Mongrain for organizing this tremendous event along with Preston Kuo who organized the overall book launch.

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. Dec 3 - 6, 2019; Jan 14 - 17; Mar 10 - 13; Jul 21 - 24; Aug 18 - 21, 2020.

ORDER a BOX of 20 SCALING UP BOOKS --
Want to save 50% over the price on Amazon? Go to this link. 

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

Write Your Own Book --
Whether you want to make it to the bestseller lists or just sell a lot more of your goods or services, with a profound competitive edge over the competition, Book The Business: How to Make BIG Money With Your Book Without Selling a Single Copy is for you!

Request your free copy of this ground-breaking book at advantagefamily.com/scalingup.

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:

Execute Scaling Up Faster and Drive Accountability -- Drive Execution with Scaling Up Scoreboard, the official software tool for implementing Scaling Up – available online and in a mobile app. The technology behind Scaling Up Scoreboard is proven to help you achieve 3.5x more goals. Learn more at https://scalingup.com/software/ - on your computer, tablet or phone.

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.