The Most Crucial Scaling Skill? Linking Short-Term Realities to Long-Term Dreams

A couple years back, I went to a talk by Bill Campbell at the Stanford Directors’ College, a program for guiding people who serve on the boards of publicly traded firms. Campbell is the most revered director and mentor in Silicon Valley. He serves on the Apple and Intuit boards and is renowned for his role in developing dozens of influential executives, including leaders at Google and Apple. Everyone calls Campbell “the coach” because he was head coach of the Columbia University football team until he was 39—before he left New York to work in Silicon Valley. During the final decade of Steve Jobs’s life, Campbell and the legendary Apple CEO took a walk—and had a talk—together almost every Sunday. When someone at the Directors’ College asked Campbell about the most crucial skill for a senior executive, he said it was the rare ability (which Jobs had in spades) to make sure that the short-term stuff gets done and done well, while simultaneously never losing sight of what matters in the end.

This is a tricky balance for us human beings. Research by New York University’s Yaacov Trope and his colleagues shows that thinking about distant events is good because we focus on long-term goals—and it is bad because we manufacture unrealistic fantasies. We don’t think enough about the steps required to achieve those ends, and when we do we underestimate how much time and effort they will take. But thinking only about looming deadlines and short-term goals is a mixed bag as well. We focus on what is feasible, on the steps to take right now, but we forget or downplay long-term goals. So we direct our efforts toward achievable milestones even when they undermine our ability to reach our ultimate destination.

Scaling requires the wherewithal to hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now—the perpetual present tense that every person is trapped in—to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later. For example, consider how Shannon May and her colleagues set the stage for linking the present to the future when they founded Bridge International Academies. This for profit chain of standardized schools now operates more than 200 schools and serves over 80,000 poor children in Africa -- their families pay about five dollars a month tuition. When my co-author Huggy Rao and I interviewed May, she emphasized that they started “building for scaling” in their very first school in Nairobi, which they opened in the Mukuru slum in January of 2009. Although her founding team was on site and could easily communicate face to face with staff, students, and parents, they insisted on doing so mostly via cell phones because, as Shannon put it, “with everything we did, we asked ourselves if it would work with one hundred schools.”

Google took a similar approach. Shona Brown served as executive vice president of operations there from 2003 to 2011. She was the fourth-highest ranking executive in the firm, after founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt. Brown played a central role in scaling Google from 1000 employees in Mountain View, California, to 30,000 employees across dozens of locations around the globe. Brown told us that, in every decision they made, Google’s leaders tried to resist doing what was easiest now. They asked, “How will this work when we are ten times or a hundred times bigger?” They thought, “Let’s not decide based on what is best now, let’s decide based on what will be best in two or three years.”

Brown said that this mindset created challenges in hiring. There was always a temptation to “bring aboard some warm body that could do the job right now.” They usually forced themselves to resist because Google needed not only people who could do the current job. They waited to find people who were broad enough and curious enough to grow into new roles and take on more responsibility -- and who would live and transmit the company’s “lifeblood” to others, its culture of innovation. Google has always been notoriously slow to hire, involving large numbers of Google managers, executives, engineers, and other employees in interviewing and selecting every employee. Every new hire is still approved at the organization’s highest levels. Brown emphasized that at times this picky process slowed growth, stalled product releases, and created heavier workloads for Googlers who needed help right now. But Brown believes this disciplined hiring process is a key reason that the company she left in 2012 had a culture so similar to the company she had joined in 2003. It is still a decentralized place filled with smart people who don’t need much hand-holding to generate new insights, make good decisions, and implement ideas.

This focus on short-term actions that make scaling easier down the road doesn’t apply just to growing an organization. It can help people and teams spread better practices across a mature organization. When we talked to retired vice-president Claudia Kotchka about her successful efforts spreading innovation practices at Procter & Gamble, she emphasized that her team needed some early wins. Yet, much like a game of chess, they needed early wins that set the stage for future victories rather than defeats. The best quick wins help people start and persist on the scaling journey. These victories fuel optimism and excitement, make memorable stories, and convey that you are scaling something feasible. They also instill confidence and provide a protective coating of legitimacy to help your team weather future storms. With these goals in mind, Kotchka’s team began by working with P&G’s most troubled brands, where quick successes seemed possible and executives were hungry for solutions.

Their early successes with Mr. Clean, a stalled and stale brand, were crucial. Kotchka’s team tapped into customer frustrations with annoying cleaning chores, along with feelings and memories associated with the Mr. Clean brand. These lessons led to the launch of Mr. Clean Magic Reach in 2005, which made it easier to scrub bathrooms. Magic Reach wasn’t a blockbuster, but it sold well. The work with Mr. Clean enticed other P&G businesses to test the new innovation practices, and the shot of confidence helped sustain Kotchka’s team during the journey ahead. That early win also set the stage for a big payoff. It taught Mr. Clean’s leaders to think about their brand differently, which “led to them try new ideas beyond liquids, including the mega-hit Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.”

Photo: Jay Malone / Flickr

Robert Sutton is a Stanford Professor and co-author (with Huggy Rao) of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less. This piece is an edited excerpt from that book. You can learn more about his ideas and writing from my LinkedIn Influencer posts and Work Matters blog, and if you want to learn more about Sutton and Rao's work on scaling, watch this interview or check out this INC story.