Narrator: Imagine a single team in your organization that is a pocket of pure genius. They are faster, more innovative, and more effective than anyone else. Now, how do you take that magic—that specific set of beliefs and behaviors—and spread it to ten, a hundred, or a thousand other teams without it becoming a diluted, mediocre copy of the original? This is the "Problem of More," a universal challenge that plagues leaders, founders, and managers everywhere. It’s the treacherous gap between having a pocket of excellence and achieving excellence at scale. In their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao dissect this very problem, providing a roadmap for navigating the messy, complex, and often counterintuitive journey of spreading greatness.

Narrator: Sutton and Rao argue that leaders often mistakenly approach scaling like an "air war," believing they can achieve victory through grand, sweeping announcements, top-down mandates, or a single brilliant strategic strike. However, true, lasting change is won on the ground. This "ground war" mentality means focusing on the painstaking, incremental work of changing beliefs and behaviors one person, one team, and one foot at a time. It requires what the authors call "grit"—the stamina to persevere through setbacks and the patience to see long-term efforts through.

This concept is illustrated by the rigorous teacher training at Bridge International Academies, a chain of low-cost schools in developing countries. To hire eight hundred new teachers, their team didn't just send out a memo. They fought a ground war. They interviewed ten thousand candidates, administered exams, and put 1,400 finalists through an intensive five-week training camp to instill the "Bridge mindset." Only then did they select the final 800. This meticulous, ground-level effort ensures that as Bridge scales, its standard of excellence isn't just maintained—it's deeply embedded in every new person who joins.

Narrator: At the heart of any scaling challenge is a fundamental tension: should the organization demand strict, faithful replication of the original model, or should it allow for local customization and adaptation? The authors frame this as a choice between a "Catholic" approach and a "Buddhist" one. The Catholic model, like Intel's famous "Copy Exactly!" philosophy, mandates that every detail of a process is cloned perfectly. This ensures consistency and quality, which is ideal for highly technical or brand-dependent operations like In-N-Out Burger, where every location is a near-perfect replica of the others.

The Buddhist approach, however, recognizes that a core mindset can be expressed in different ways depending on the context. This was powerfully demonstrated when a team from Stanford’s d.school tried to teach design thinking to managers from Singapore. The standard American-style debriefing, an open "I like, I wish" session, failed completely due to cultural norms around criticizing authority. A Japanese designer on the team, Yusuke Miyashita, suggested a simple tweak: have the managers write their feedback on Post-it notes first and then read them aloud. This small adaptation, or "Yusuke's flex," transformed the exercise from an awkward silence into a vibrant, productive discussion. It shows that sometimes, to scale an idea, you must allow it to be translated, not just transcribed.

Narrator: To get people to commit to the hard work of scaling, leaders must connect a "hot cause" with a "cool solution." A hot cause is an emotionally resonant problem or story that triggers a sense of urgency and righteous anger. A cool solution is the concrete, practical plan that channels that emotional energy into productive action. Talking about a new mindset is not enough; people need to feel its importance and see a clear path to implementing it.

A powerful example of this comes from a student-led campaign at Stanford to increase bicycle helmet use. The hot cause was the story of Kali Lindsay, a student who suffered a severe brain injury after a bike crash. Her emotional, firsthand account of the accident and her long recovery galvanized her classmates. But feelings alone don't change habits. The students then devised a "cool solution" they called the "Watermelon Offensive." They scattered smashed watermelons around the campus soccer field with posters showing helmetless students next to cracked melons, a visceral and humorous metaphor for a cracked skull. This campaign translated the emotional impact of Kali's story into a tangible, memorable, and ultimately effective intervention that got the soccer team to wear helmets and hold each other accountable.

Narrator: Scaling inevitably increases complexity, which can overwhelm people's limited cognitive capacity. As organizations grow, they often become "bigger and dumber" as coordination costs skyrocket and individual performance drops. The authors argue that leaders must act as "load busters," actively working to simplify processes and reduce the mental burden on their teams. This often requires strategic subtraction—eliminating unnecessary rules, roles, and rituals.

Adobe, for instance, eliminated its traditional annual performance reviews for its eleven thousand employees. The old system consumed 80,000 hours of managers' time each year and left employees feeling demotivated. By subtracting this soul-crushing process and replacing it with frequent, informal "check-ins," Adobe reduced cognitive load, improved morale, and saw voluntary attrition drop by 30 percent. Subtraction is about clearing the way for excellence by removing what stands in its way.

Narrator: One of the most critical principles in the book is that negative emotions, experiences, and behaviors have a far greater impact than positive ones. A single "bad apple" on a team can tank performance by 30 to 40 percent, and one negative interaction with a boss can erase the goodwill from five positive ones. Therefore, scaling excellence requires a relentless focus on eliminating the bad. This means nipping destructive behavior in the bud, removing toxic individuals, and dismantling perverse incentives that reward the wrong actions.

Disney is a master of this principle. The magic of its theme parks isn't just about creating positive moments; it's about obsessively eliminating "dissonant details." Cast members are trained to be "aggressively friendly," proactively spotting and addressing anything that might detract from a guest's experience, from a piece of trash on the ground to a frustrated family. By stamping out the bad, they create an environment where the good can flourish. This focus on "breaking bad" is not a secondary task; it is a prerequisite for scaling up excellence.

Narrator: To turn knowledge into action and avoid predictable failures, Sutton and Rao champion a technique called the "premortem." Popularized by psychologist Gary Klein, it's a simple but powerful mental exercise. Before launching a major scaling effort, the team is asked to imagine that it is one year in the future and the project has failed spectacularly. They then work backward to write the story of why it failed.

This technique flips the script on traditional planning. Instead of fostering irrational optimism, it legitimizes doubt and encourages team members to voice concerns they might otherwise suppress. It helps uncover blind spots, reveal hidden disagreements, and identify potential obstacles before they derail the project. Had the IT team at Stanford University conducted a premortem before their disastrous "big bang" rollout of a new Oracle financial system, they might have foreseen the chaos that ensued and chosen a more gradual, successful path. The premortem forces a team to confront the potential for failure, making success far more likely.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Scaling Up Excellence is that spreading the best of what you do is not a matter of simple replication; it is a complex, human-centric challenge of mindset management. It requires leaders to be both architects and gardeners—designing robust systems while also nurturing the beliefs, emotions, and connections that allow excellence to take root and grow.

The book's most challenging idea is that to scale faster and better, you must often slow down. In a world that rewards speed, the discipline to pause, to engage in a "ground war," to conduct a premortem, and to eliminate the negative before amplifying the positive is a difficult but essential practice. The ultimate question it leaves us with is not just "How do we get bigger?" but "How do we get better as we get bigger?"