Olivia: A study of twenty-six different innovation teams found that the bigger the team, the worse each individual member performed. Jackson: Wait, hold on. That's the complete opposite of what you'd expect. You add more smart people, you should get a smarter team, right? Olivia: Exactly. But it turns out adding more people can actually make the collective dumber. It’s one of the core paradoxes explored in the book we're diving into today: Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. Jackson: Okay, that title has a lot going on. "Getting to more without settling for less." That sounds like the holy grail for any growing company. Olivia: It really is. And these aren't just any authors; they're both renowned professors at Stanford. They spent nearly a decade researching this, talking to everyone from Pixar to the U.S. Navy Seals, to figure out this one fundamental problem: how do you spread something good without it falling apart? Jackson: A decade of research... wow. Where do you even start with a problem that big? It feels like trying to boil the ocean. Olivia: You start with a single, fundamental choice. The authors argue that before you do anything else, you have to decide what kind of "religion" your organization is going to follow.

Jackson: Religion? Okay, you've got my attention. Are we talking about actual faith here? Olivia: Not exactly, but the analogy is brilliant. They frame it as a choice between "Catholicism" and "Buddhism." The Catholic approach is all about strict replication. Think of the Catholic Church itself—the mass is the same, the rituals are the same, whether you're in Rome or Manila. It’s about standardization and control. Jackson: I can see that. So what's a business example of that? Olivia: The perfect example is In-N-Out Burger. If you've been to one, you've been to them all. The menu is tiny and unchanging. The uniforms are crisp and identical. The quality is relentlessly consistent. They are hardcore "Catholics" of scaling, and their cult-like following proves it works for them. They replicate excellence perfectly. Jackson: Right, you know exactly what you're getting. So what's the "Buddhist" side of the coin? Olivia: Buddhism is about local adaptation. The core philosophy—the mindset—is the same, but the specific practices can vary wildly from place to place. The best example is Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC. A KFC in Kentucky is very different from a KFC in Beijing. Jackson: How so? Olivia: In China, KFC sells things like egg tarts, congee, and soy milk alongside their fried chicken. They took the core idea—fast, friendly service—but adapted the menu completely to local tastes. They are "Buddhists," and it's made them massively successful in a market where many others have failed. Jackson: That makes so much sense. But what happens when you pick the wrong religion for the wrong place? Olivia: Disaster. And that brings us to the cautionary tale of Home Depot in China. They went in with a purely "Catholic" mindset. They built their massive, American-style warehouses, assuming the Chinese market would embrace the "do-it-yourself" or DIY ethos. Jackson: And I'm guessing they didn't. Olivia: Not at all. Chinese culture, especially at the time, was very much "do-it-for-me." People lived in smaller apartments and hired cheap labor for home projects. The idea of spending a weekend installing your own kitchen cabinets was completely foreign. Home Depot rigidly stuck to its model and, after years of losses, had to close all its big-box stores there. They chose the wrong faith for the territory. Jackson: Wow. So this one choice can make or break you. But can you be a bit of both? It feels like it has to be a spectrum, not just one or the other. Olivia: Absolutely. And that's where the most sophisticated companies land. They use what the book calls "guardrails." They are ruthlessly Catholic about a few core, non-negotiable things, but allow Buddhist-style freedom on everything else. Kaiser Permanente, the healthcare giant, did this when they rolled out their massive electronic health records system. Jackson: How did they do that? Olivia: They mandated that the core software and data standards had to be identical everywhere to ensure patient safety and system integrity. That was their Catholicism. But they let each region decide how to train their staff, how to schedule the rollout, and how to design the workflows around the system. That was their Buddhism. They set firm boundaries but gave local leaders the autonomy to navigate within them. It was a huge success.

Jackson: Okay, so you've picked your model—Catholic, Buddhist, or something in between. But that’s just a blueprint. How do you get thousands of people to actually care enough to build it? You can't just send a memo saying, "Be excellent now." Olivia: You can't. And that leads to the second big idea: you need to connect a "hot cause" to a "cool solution." A hot cause is the emotional core, the story that grabs you by the heart and makes you feel something. A cool solution is the practical, tangible set of actions you can take. Jackson: A hot cause... like a mission statement? Olivia: More visceral than that. It's often a story. The book tells this incredibly powerful story about a Stanford student named Kali Lindsay. She was an avid cyclist, but like many students, she stopped wearing her helmet because she felt it looked dorky. One day, she had a terrible crash on campus. She suffered a brain injury, lost consciousness, and spent a year and a half in a painful recovery, dealing with memory loss and panic attacks. Jackson: Oh man, that's a gut punch. Just hearing that, I can feel it. Olivia: Exactly. That's the hot cause. It's not a statistic about head injuries; it's a human story of pain and regret. It creates an emotional charge. But that emotion is useless unless you channel it. That's where the cool solution comes in. Jackson: So what was the cool solution for the helmet problem? Olivia: This is the best part. A group of students in Sutton and Rao's class was tasked with getting the Stanford men's soccer team—a group of guys who thought they were too tough for helmets—to start wearing them. Their solution was called the "Watermelon Offensive." Jackson: The... Watermelon Offensive? You're telling me they threw watermelons at people? Olivia: Almost! They scattered smashed watermelons all over the soccer field, right next to bike racks. They put up posters of students with a smashed watermelon next to their head. It was visceral, visual, and a little bit dark, but also playful. They got the team together, shared Kali's story—the hot cause—and then introduced this campaign—the cool solution. They even had the players sign a pledge and encouraged them to playfully toss watermelons at teammates they caught without a helmet. Jackson: That is brilliant! It's memorable, it creates peer pressure, and it links the abstract danger to something you can see and feel. But does that kind of creative, small-scale thing work in a huge corporation? Olivia: It does, just in a different form. Think of JetBlue after their infamous "Valentine's Day Massacre" in 2007, where an ice storm led to a complete operational meltdown. The "hot cause" was the public humiliation and the thousands of furious customers. The "cool solution" was a project led by an executive named Bonny Simi. She got a diverse team in a room with huge sheets of paper and asked them to map out every single step of closing an airport, using Post-it notes. They found hundreds of flaws, and fixing them, one pink sticky note at a time, became the cool solution that transformed their operations.

Olivia: But even with the perfect model and all the motivation in the world, scaling efforts often fail. The very act of growing can make an organization dumber and less effective. Jackson: And that brings us back to the hook you started with. How on earth does adding more smart people make a group dumber? It defies logic. Olivia: It's because of something called "cognitive load." Our brains have a very limited amount of working memory, like the RAM on a computer. When you overload it, your ability to make good decisions plummets. The book cites a classic experiment to show this. Jackson: Let me guess, it involves chocolate cake? Olivia: You know it. Researchers had two groups of students memorize a number. One group had to remember two digits, like '62'. The other group had to remember seven digits, like '8395201'. Then, on their way to another room, they were offered a snack: either a healthy fruit salad or a rich slice of chocolate cake. Jackson: And the people with the seven-digit number overwhelming chose the cake. Olivia: By a huge margin! The simple act of holding a few extra digits in their brain depleted their willpower and led them to make the more impulsive, less rational choice. Now, apply that to an organization. As you scale, you add more people, more projects, more rules, more meetings. The cognitive load on everyone skyrockets. Jackson: And that's the "team scaling fallacy." The more people on a team, the more communication links you have to manage. A team of 5 has 10 connections. A team of 12 has 66. Your brain is constantly trying to manage those relationships, which leaves less capacity for actual work. Olivia: Precisely. And this overload is made even worse by another principle: "bad is stronger than good." Negative events, negative emotions, and negative people have a disproportionately powerful impact. Jackson: Oh, I know this one. Everyone has worked with a "bad apple." That one person who is cynical, lazy, or just plain toxic. It's exhausting. You spend more time managing their drama than doing your actual job. Olivia: Research backs you up completely. One study found that a single "bad apple" in a small group can tank the team's overall performance by 30 to 40 percent. They sow conflict, break down trust, and suck all the energy out of the room. The effort to contain one negative person creates immense cognitive load for everyone else. Jackson: So what's the fix? Just fire people? That seems harsh. Olivia: The book argues that, yes, sometimes you have to get rid of the bad apples. But more broadly, it's about being a vigilant gardener. You have to proactively "break bad" by nipping negative behaviors in the bud, simplifying processes to reduce cognitive load, and protecting the organization from the corrosive effects of negativity.

Olivia: When you put it all together, you see that scaling isn't a single action. It's this constant, dynamic balancing act. You have to choose your philosophy—that Catholic replication or Buddhist adaptation. You have to fuel the journey with both emotion, the hot cause, and practical tools, the cool solutions. And all the while, you have to be relentlessly clearing the path, fighting those hidden saboteurs of complexity and negativity before they choke out the good stuff. Jackson: So the big idea is that growth isn't an event you manage, it's a discipline you practice. It’s not about a launch; it’s about the long, hard journey that follows. Olivia: Exactly. It's a ground war, not an air war. It’s won foot by foot, conversation by conversation. Jackson: If there's one practical tool listeners could take away from this, what would it be? Olivia: I love the "premortem" technique. Before you launch any big project, get your team in a room and say, "Okay, let's imagine it's six months from now, and this project has failed spectacularly. It's a complete disaster. Let's spend the next 15 minutes writing down all the reasons why it failed." Jackson: That's a great mind trick. It bypasses our natural optimism and gives people permission to voice the doubts they'd normally keep to themselves. Olivia: It surfaces real risks. It's a simple, powerful way to stress-test an idea before you commit. Jackson: I love that. It makes you think about your own team or company. Are you more "Catholic" or "Buddhist" in how you spread ideas? Do you have a hot cause, or just a pile of cool solutions nobody cares about? Olivia: Great questions to reflect on. We'd love to hear your stories. Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.