Scaling People

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no matter how brilliant a company is, it will not get far, let alone have an impact at scale, without strong management and sound operating systems—what you might call core processes.

This is the kind of book I wish I’d had when I started leading teams. It’s a valuable (and highly practical) look at how to build teams (especially larger ones). And, unlike most business books, it’s light on fluffy anecdotes to pad out the page count. If you lead teams or work within a medium-to-large company I recommend reading Scaling People.

I put Post-its over many pages so these are just my simplified notes / reminders to myself.

• In most companies you want only a small number of things to apply to everyone. Company-wide processes incur coordination costs so reserve them for things like planning, hiring, and performance.
• To figure out what you personally should work on it helps to ask two questions: What can you do really well? What are your capabilities (either natural or learned over time)?
• One way to look at performance is that it’s results multiplied by behaviors. That means that negative behaviors should cancel out the entire of positive results.
• She recommends two standing rituals within a team: a weekly team meeting and a weekly team metrics review. The intent is to maintain progress and surface anything holding the team back.

And some other quotes that stuck with me:

Many people think management is about other people. I think management starts with understanding what you’re good at and what you need to work on.

I’m fond of saying “A strategy should hurt.” The trade-offs—where you invest time and resources, and where you don’t—should be painful and disappointing, either internally or to your customers. There’s no such thing as a strong strategy that prioritizes everything at once.

Trust is inversely proportional to hypocrisy. Good communication is about providing timely and honest information, including being willing to acknowledge mistakes. People forgive mistakes, but they lose trust when information is hidden, false, or misleading, or when leadership says something but doesn’t follow through.