Book SummaryScaling Up, by Verne Harnish

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Scaling Up

Expanding your business is always going to present significant challenges. In Scaling Up, Verne Harnish explores what it takes to lead a company through the growth process.

Often, growth entails entering an entirely new market space, expanding a firm’s physical footprint, achieving new market share, and multiplying many times over the number of employees on payroll. All successful scaling up efforts, Harnish writes, are guided by an ultimate vision of where the company needs to go and a multi-year strategy that outlines the processes, people, and benchmarks it...

Scaling Up Summary Overview

Harnish argues that there are several crucial elements to successfully guiding your business as it grows from a small company or sole proprietorship into a leading firm in your industry:

• Articulating a clear vision of where you want your company to be at the end of the growth process—guided by values that clearly signal to employees and customers who your company is and what it does
• Crafting the right long-term, multiyear strategy that can bring that vision to life, set the company on a path to profitability, and keep your team focused through the short-term growing pains
• Building the right structure and oversight to promote accountability and follow through—while maintaining flexibility to ensure that your growth strategy can adapt to changing market conditions
• Putting the right people in place, hiring and promoting based on accomplishments...

Scaling Up Summary Articulate Your Vision

According to Harnish, scaling up requires the articulation of a grand vision, an idea about not just how much the company will do, but more deeply, what it primarily exists to do. Ultimately, a vision is about what ultimate “state” or identity the company aspires to achieve. Bringing this vision into focus and aligning all company activities toward its achievement is what a strategy is for.

For example, a furniture retailer might have a vision of being the nation’s largest, best-known, and most-trusted name for families looking to decorate the home of their dreams. Or an investment bank might have a vision of being the financial world’s leader in “green” investments.

Beyond just an “About Us'' section on your website, your vision is the “why” that should anchor every decision your company makes. And studies show that defining this vision makes a significant difference to your customers and employees. A survey conducted by EY and Harvard Business school found that, of 474 executives surveyed, [89% agreed that a company’s sense of purpose was an important contributor to employee...

Scaling Up Summary Strategy: Put Your Vision Into Action

According to Harnish, a strategy is the means by which a company brings its vision to fruition and outlines the multiyear benchmarks that it will need to reach to make the vision a reality. He writes that a clear strategy puts a company’s daily actions into perspective and orients everything toward that singular vision. Indeed, the strategy informs everything that goes on in your company—from marketing decisions to hiring, workflow processes, and accounting practices.

This can have great clarifying power. By driving toward a vision whose fulfillment requires buy-in from every sector of the company, your strategy should instill in your team the belief that they are part of something larger than themselves. Harnish writes that anchoring day-to-day functions within a broader strategy in service of an ultimate vision also helps reduce turnover and boost productivity—both of which in and of themselves are crucial to successful company growth.

Defining a Vision and Strategy

In Traction, Gino Wickman highlights some key factors that go into crafting a vision and strategy—a company’s defining values, its main focus,...

Scaling Up Summary Build Your Team

Harnish writes that once you’ve articulated your company’s vision and crafted the strategy to bring that vision to life, it’s time to develop your company’s most important resource: its people. Without quality people, any effort at growth will be short-lived and fizzle out before you even get started. To scale up successfully, you need to build an all-star team, from senior leadership to middle management and the rank-and-file.

Cultivating this top-tier team means changing both how you hire new people and how you train and motivate people already with the company.

New Hires Tactic #1: Focus on Accomplishments, Not Job Descriptions

Harnish says that when creating new positions, you should ditch the practice of writing job descriptions. Job descriptions are just what they sound like: descriptions. All they do is tell you the boxes that a person needs to tick every day to do their job. And if you focus too much on that, you’ll end up hiring people who do nothing more than tick boxes.

Instead of designing roles with specific day-to-day functions in mind, Harnish recommends designing roles in which people are asked to accomplish specific goals from year to year....

Scaling Up Summary Ensure Implementation

By now, you have most of the pieces in place to begin growing, expanding, and making progress toward your ambitious goal. You’ve defined your vision, crafted a multiyear strategy to bring it to fruition, and put the right team in place to make it all happen.

But even after doing all that, you as the leader can’t just walk away and assume that the entire operation will run on its own. You need to be on the ground to guide implementation of the scaling-up plan. Harnish writes that there are four keys to this:

• Promote accountability by making sure every function and process is assigned to an individual.
• Set intermediate goals to secure company buy-in and learn valuable lessons as you go.
• Track your progress with KPIs.
• Think beyond just profits by looking toward maintaining healthy cash flow.

Promote Accountability

Harnish writes that effective systems of personnel management are essential to successful implementation of the strategy. Crucially, people must be accountable for the processes and functions that they touch.

With every core function and process, assign responsibility for it to a single person. They own it now. Everything that gets done in your...

Shortform Exercise: Scale Up Your Business

Think about how you can take your business to the next level.

Can you articulate a 10-year vision for your business? Briefly describe what it is.

Shortform Exercise: Work Cross-Functionally

Think through how you work with others from different teams.

Have you ever been part of a cross-functional, cross-departmental, or any other team where you’ve had to work collaboratively with people who had different sets of knowledge and/or expertise from yours? Briefly describe the situation.