#242: Lessons from Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up

Good morning good people

If you’re growing a business (or even a division in a large corporation) you must read Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up. His genius is distilling the world’s best business thinking into clear, actionable frameworks. One day, when I’m big, I might try my version thereof.  

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/strategy
Scaling Up confronts the confounding complexity of business and simplifies it into a few focus areas.

Harnish identifies three barriers that every business will confront when growing:

1. “Leadership: the inability to staff/grow enough leaders throughout the organization who have the capabilities to delegate and predict
2. Scalable infrastructure: the lack of systems and structures (physical and organizational) to handle the complexities in communication and decisions that come with growth
3. Marketing: the failure to scaleup an effective marketing function capable of attracting new customers, talent, advisors, and other key relationships to the business”. 

And spotlights four fundamental processes – Leading People, Setting Strategy, Driving Execution and Managing Cash. Harnish writes

• “In leading People: Establish a handful of rules, repeat yourself a lot, and act consistently with those rules”. Uncover your core values and use them to guide all decisions and systems in the company.
• In setting Strategy, “follow the definition from the great business strategist Gary Hamel. You don’t have a real strategy if it doesn’t pass two tests: First, what you’re planning to do really matters to enough customers; and second, it differentiates you from your competition.
• In driving Execution, implement three key habits: Set a handful of Priorities (the fewer the better); gather quantitative and qualitative Data daily and review weekly to guide decisions; and establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting Rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster.
• In managing Cash, don’t run out of it! This means paying as much attention to how every decision affects cash flow as you would to revenue and profitability.” 

Of course, in each of those things, is a world of work. Organisations are people. People are complex and dynamic. Nothing can or will stay the same. Leadership is an active process of perpetually managing polarities and trade-offs. But, Harnish’s framework helps focus our attention and effort. Three barriers. Four fundamental processes. Manage those well, and almost everything will go better.

Scaling Up is packed with great proverb-like cautions. Here are five of my favourites:

1. “People join companies. They leave managers. Therefore, to keep your team happy and engaged, you need one thing above all else: great managers/coaches — not free lunches or yoga classes! As Gallup notes, ‘Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores.’”
2. “Ask a good manager about his team and he will speak in generalities, saying that they are hardworking, responsible, fun, etc. Ask a great manager the same question and she will describe each of her team members with specific details about their personality, strengths, and achievements.”
3. “Nothing can emerge from the collective brain of the team that doesn’t enter it first.”
4. “Senior leaders need to be in the market 80% of the week, either figuratively or literally.”
5. “Success belongs to those who have these two attributes – an insatiable desire to learn and an unquenchable bias for action.”

(You will find more of Harnish’s wisdom here).

//self
If, like me, you’re feeling a trifle battered by the news-cycle, these two LinkedIn posts are useful counter-depressants.

Zanele Calitz’s starts, “My name is Zanele, pronounced Zanell. Now, I know what you’re thinking—a white Afrikaans girl with a Xhosa name? It’s not something you hear every day. But my name is more than just a name. It’s a journey. It’s a story of identity, belonging, and embracing the unexpected.”

South Africans being South Africans, the comments instantly baptise her ‘MaZet’

And Yannick Deza writes, “I grew up dark-skinned in a white neighborhood. People thought I was a poor immigrant. I wasn’t, but I had no control over that. Today, I’m light-skinned in a Black country. People think I’m a rich tourist. I’m not, but I have no control over that either”.

Read both posts and the comments. You are guaranteed to feel more optimistic. Deza and Calitz remind us that we all have the power to connect and create new possibilities.

///soul
As you approach Cape Town from the airport, you’re confronted with a choice. You can bend to the right, or you can keep left and take Philip Kgosana Drive. Keep left. Philip Kgosana hugs Table Mountain’s lower curves. Its snaking silhouette requires concentration but gifts joy.

Drive it in the late dusk when the ocean’s nighttime moody black-blue is offset as the setting sun bounces its rays off extravagantly multi-faceted windows in the Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and Silo Hotel, spreading a soften golden aura over the V&A Waterfront, whilst the safety-lights of the dockyard’s gigantic cranes blink on in caution. Eternal light and electric light merging and morphing in play. In those moments there no more beautiful city on the planet than Cape Town.

On this day, 30 March, sixty-five years ago, the twenty-three-year-old Philip Kgosana led a march of 30,000 into Cape Town. It was nine days after the Sharpeville Massacre. He died at 80, on my birthday, on 20 April 2017.

He and the thousands who marched with him bequeathed South Africa and the world a memory that invigorates us still, a memory that oppression will always fail, that the only future is a future of solidarity, of mutual care, love and respect, all else dooms us to a living death. It is a future worth protecting, worth fighting for and one that we can all do. In each day in the simple acts of greeting, of knowing names, of truly seeing, of unlocking the best in those around us, we too can be revolutionaries.

Much love

Karl

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