Book of the Week #5 - The Voltage Effect, by John List
Melina Palmer
The Brainy Business CEO + podcast host. 3x Author. Consultant. Keynote + TEDx speaker. Inc columnist. Teaching Applied Behavioral Economics via Texas A&M Human Behavior Lab.
"That will never scale."
"Why? What's missing?"
"I can't tell you that, but I can tell you this doesn't have it..."
Good news to everyone who has been baffled by why great ideas failed to scale -- there is a science to it and John List has cracked the code! His new book, The Voltage Effect: How To Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale is officially available now!
Here's a sneak peek at the 5 Vital Signs John says every idea needs to solve the scaling problem:
You can hear John explain this in episode 190 of The Brainy Business podcast, which comes out this Friday, February 4 (and of course, pick up your copy of The Voltage Effect right now to start reading!)
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Don't Ignore The Signs
There are so many great insights from the book and our conversation. One of my favorites is that you need to look for the things that could go wrong instead of explaining them away or ignoring them, which our brains are biased to want to do.
When you notice there is a loose string on the sweater, don't tuck it in and hope no one notices. Pull at it! You need to try to unravel the sweater before it unravels you; it is better to figure out these issues before you spend a lot of time and money launching a program that won't work at scale.
John has a great example of of a pre-K program he built which had amazing results (and he was told would never scale -- an inspiration for writing this book). If your program is dependent upon having great teachers, it can't scale. You need to try it with average and bad teachers to see if the curriculum still gets results. If you can get results with bad teachers, you've got something that can scale! This is just one of the fantastic insights and examples in our book of the week, The Voltage Effect, and my interview with John List coming out on Friday!
What are your thoughts on scaling? ??
P.S. Click here for a sneak peek at my working notes for the episode if you want even more little tidbits of what is to come! And don't forget to subscribe to the show.
Account Executive II | Daxko | M.B.A.
2 年Can't wait to give this episode a listen and the book a read! For those in the central Texas area, he will also be doing a guest lecture at Texas A&M university on 02/10.