This is a preview of the Shortform book summary of The Voltage Effect by John A. List.
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Published in 2022, The Voltage Effect by John A. List is an economics text designed to help you understand the characteristics of scalable ideas. Scalability is the capacity of an idea to transition from a relatively small initial audience to a much larger one. List uses the word “voltage” to describe the power and momentum of scalable ideas, and he lays out a framework for building and preserving your idea’s voltage as you scale.

List is a...

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The Voltage Effect Summary The Four Red Flags

Scaling is the process of bringing an idea from a small audience or sample size to a much larger one. Many businesses, nonprofits, and individuals want to scale their ideas for a variety of reasons—to make more money, do more good, or simply to spread their ideas as widely as possible (or some combination of the three).

For example, if your brownies are always selling out at your local community center’s bake sale, you might consider scaling up your baking operation. By mass-producing and marketing your brownies, you’d be able to make enough money to quit your day job while also donating more money to the community center, and you’d have the satisfaction of spreading your creations far and wide.

(Shortform note: Experts note that there are key differences between growth and scaling. Often, when a business grows, its costs increase in proportion to its revenues, meaning that while the business grows larger, it doesn’t necessarily become more profitable. However, when a business scales, its revenues increase at a higher rate than its costs, resulting in much greater profitability.)

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The Voltage Effect Summary How to Scale Successfully

Once you’ve gone through the author’s red flags and determined that your idea is likely to succeed at scale, it’s time to put your ideas into action. As you scale your idea, List recommends a few strategies to help give your idea its best chance to scale successfully: Set the right incentives, avoid the sunk cost fallacy, and build a positive organizational culture.

Incentivize to Win

List’s first strategy for successful scaling is setting the right incentives to motivate your team. List argues that incentives are a more effective focus than leadership style or personality when it comes to managing your workforce at scale. It’s better to focus on incentives than leadership style because as we’ve learned, talented individuals don’t scale, making it impossible to replicate the unique qualities of gifted leaders across your organization. However, incentives are much more easily scaled as blanket policies across your organization.

(Shortform note: While List fervently advocates workplace incentives, other authors have argued that incentives have little to no effect on employee performance. These authors argue that at best, [incentives cause employees to briefly attempt to...

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Shortform Exercise: Diversify Your Audience

Assess your idea's current audience and devise strategies to broaden that audience.


The first red flag that indicates that your idea may not scale is the lack of a scalable audience. The first step in knowing if your audience will scale is identifying your current audience. If your idea has already launched, who has it succeeded with thus far? If your idea has not yet launched, who are you hoping to reach? Briefly describe the group that comprises your current (or target) audience.

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