Pre-Order Scaling Up Excellence and Get a "Sneak Peek" at 25% of the Book

Scaling Up Excellence will be published on February 4th, 2014.  We know that is a long time wait.  We want to get some of the main ideas out there before the book comes out to get your reactions and ideas about scaling, and of course, to get people excited about buying the book.  And authors especially love pre-orders -- they are great for setting the stage for a successful book.  So we've spent the last couple weeks working with Justin Gammon (our fantastic cover designer) and Ayelet Gruenspecht at Crown publishing to arrange a "sneak peek" of about 25% of the book for people who pre-order the book.  We worked hard to make the process as painless as possible. 

Here are the steps

1. Pre-order the book online 

2. Go to our new site scalingupexcellence.com and the simple form there (just click "here" it is hard to miss!).

3. Ayelet will send you an email from Random House with the pdf (which you unlock with the password she sends you). 

Scalingupexcellence.com has links to a variety of places where you can order the book, so you can to do everything there. But as long as you have an order number (which comes in the email that all booksellers send after a purchase) it doesn't mater where you buy it. 

You've got 30 days to read it.  The pdf we will send you contains:

 The Table of Contents, so you can see what is in the book.

The Preface "The Problem of More." It describes how we can became interested in the scaling challenge, what we mean by scaling, and several overarching lessons that run throughout the book including "scaling is a problem of more and less" and "scaling starts and ends with individuals."

Chapter 1 "It's a Ground War, Not Just an Air War: Going Slower to Scale Faster (and Better) Later."  This chapter starts with the most important lesson that we learned from the seven years we've spent (so far) studying scaling and digs into seven mantras, themes that pervade the book including "spread a mindset, not just a footprint," "link short-term realities to long-term dreams," and "fear the clusterfug."

 Chapter 7 "Bad is Stronger than Good: Clearing the Way for Excellence."  As Huggy likes to put it, this chapter shows how scaling depends on going from "bad to great" because destructive beliefs and actions are so powerful and contagious that, if they aren't eliminated, or at least tamped way down, excellence can't develop, spread, and persist.  We review evidence and tell stories about methods for "breaking bad" including "plumbing before poetry" and "use the cool kids (and adults) to define and squelch bad behavior."

The book contains eight chapters, so this is about 25% of it. We look forward to your comments and reactions to our ideas,  and to your scaling stories and questions.  Huggy and I would love to hear from you.  You can always leave a comment here or email Huggy or me (see scalingupexcellence.com to send an email to Huggy); if you want to send an email to both of us at once, send it to mystory@scalingupexcellence.com. 

Thanks so much. And please spread the word about our sneak peek. 

P.S. If you tweet or blog about the sneak peek, the short URL for the new scaling site is http://bit.ly/16znToN and we are using #scalingup when we do scaling tweets and such on scaling.  Huggy just started blogging (watching him do his first tweet was really fun, he was so excited) -- and he got @huggyrao!