How to Scale What's Working at Your Company

"If you're thinking about scaling an initiative or an innovation, a sales strategy or a culture, Bob Sutton has advice for facing this long and difficult leadership challenge. He's an organizational psychologist who's taught management science at Stanford for over 40 years. Along with his colleague Huggy Rao, he's studied leaders who've scaled something successfully and those who've failed at it. In doing so, they identified habits that help spread what works, and ones that keep those early wins from catching on."

"We definitely are using it more expensively. And in fact, it's interesting, when we first started setting scaling, we were setting it in health care and in education, where they have a little bit different meaning, which is you've got a great school, or you've got a department that has a really low infection rate in a hospital, and how do you spread that little bit of magic so it becomes the norm?"

Scaling means spreading a local success—whether a practice, program, sales strategy, or culture—so it becomes the norm across larger units. Effective scaling requires diagnosing why the initial success worked, deciding what to replicate faithfully versus adapt locally, and creating habits and structures that sustain quality during growth. Common challenges include cultural dilution, loss of original values, and one-size-fits-all assumptions. Practical approaches emphasize simple rules, rituals, clear communication, attention to energy and capability, and balancing fidelity with flexibility. Contexts include healthcare, education, and startups, where the goal is to make small wins reliably repeatable at scale.

Read at Harvard Business Review