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Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
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Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

4.24  ·  Rating details ·  2,665 ratings  ·  178 reviews
Winner of the 2015 International Book Awards for General Business

Winner of the 2015 National Indie Excellence Award for General Business

Winner of the 2015 Readers' Favorite International Book Award Gold Medal for Non-Fiction Business

Winner of the 2015 Paris Book Festival Award for Business

Winner of the 2015 Amsterdam Book Festival Award for Business

Winner of the 2015 San
...more
Hardcover, 246 pages
Published October 21st 2014 by Gazelles, Inc.
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Average rating 4.24  · 
Rating details
 ·  2,665 ratings  ·  178 reviews


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Jonathan Lu
Jul 29, 2017 rated it really liked it
4D's
Driver
- Coaching
- Learning
- tech (scalable infrastructure)
Demands
- People (reputation)
- Process (productivity)
Disciplines
- Priorities
- Data
- Meeting rhythms
Decisions
- People
- Strategy
- Execution
- Cash

Barriers
28million firms - focus
- 96% < $1M: revenue
- <4% >$1M: cash
- 0.4% >$10M: GM focus
- 17,000 >$50M: predictability
- 2,500 >$500M
- 500 > $5B

Leadership
- Prediction: spend time with customers
- Delegation: not abdication.
Priorities
Data (kpi's)
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Khalid Sulami
Jan 25, 2016 rated it it was amazing
Shelves: favorites
One of the most amazing books that I've read about business and I really consider it as a MUST-READ book for any entrepreneur who wants to take the next step! Here're some takeaways:
1. Only 4% of American companies ever exceed $1 million in revenue.
2. Of the 4%, a small number develops into “gazelles” – fast-growing companies accounting for almost all of the nation’s job growth and innovation.
3. Gazelles focus on improving “people, strategy, execution and cash.”
4. Start with the most pressing
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Andrew Milne
Jan 09, 2015 rated it it was amazing
Well worth the read. Lost of good reminders &
detailed practices... One of those books that makes you challenge your thinking on your own business. I would highly recommend it for those looking for guidance as they scale.
Josh Steimle
Apr 02, 2017 rated it it was amazing
Rarely do I give out five star ratings. Five stars means it can't be improved upon. Five stars means it's so important everyone should read it. Five stars means it's on par with the Bible, or whatever religious text you subscribe to. To be clear, I'm sure this book can be improved on. Not sure how, but I don't want to limit Verne. I'm not sure EVERYONE should read this. I'm not sure what good it would do my 80 year old mother who isn't looking to scale anything but her kale garden. And it's not ...more
Bartosz Majewski
Apr 07, 2019 rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition
Shelves: business
Experience of reading this book is similar in pleasure to drinking from a firehose. Now I need to shelve it and wait a while until I will be able to resume to it. I've implemented some ideas that I've taken from this book with positive results. I am planning to keep implementing for the next 18 months in various areas of our business. Probably I will read a little fewer business books in the rest of 2019 because my pipeline of ideas is full thanks to scaling up. No point in reading more if I ...more
Jacek Bartczak
May 05, 2019 rated it really liked it
Quite an uneven book. It took me longer than I expected because I often made pauses:
- sometimes to think "wooow, that's interesting, how does it look at Casbeg / at one of my clients?",
- sometimes I lost my interest because the book repeats the same things over and over again (especially in the part about strategy).

The book includes many great tips:
- some of them are fireworks - catchy, easy to implement, results should be immediate,
- some of them usually create reactions like "I know X is
...more
Lejla
Jan 01, 2019 rated it really liked it
Very useful book, especially for those who want to start their own business or who already own one and want to improve it.

What I liked most are examples of successful companies and their way of running business. A lot of interesting stuff can be learned from this book.
Sebastian Gebski
Jun 22, 2016 rated it really liked it
I know how critically well acclaimed this book is & I'm not surprised. I appreciate what it covers & how it covers. I also don't think it's repetitive or too obvious - actually I've noted down some interesting remarks & did some highlighting as well.

But ... still I didn't enjoy it as much as some other, similar lectures. I like that author appreciates the role of organization's culture in scaling up, but IMHO his idea for building this culture "smells" too corporate & detached
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Hayden
Nov 08, 2015 rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition
Shelves: nonfiction
This book is like a collection of all the best bits of other business books. Every chapter seemed to be based on another book you've likely heard of but with a contemporary take on the lessons/points. I enjoyed this book and god a huge list of additional books to read. This books is great to giving you a large number of resources to help you address any of the scaling up issues the book identifies.
Eugene
Oct 19, 2015 rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition
great set of ideas and things to do to grow the company. I enjoyed references to other books like "read that 3 pages in that book - that is all you need to know about the subject"
David Skinner
Mar 25, 2018 rated it really liked it
Shelves: audiobooks
Harnish is intensely practical, giving incredible tips for operational efficiency, team building, meeting efficiency, and basic financial guidance. It is geared towards companies that manufacture or sell / distribute physical products, but there are principles that can be applied to anybody looking to improve themselves or their personal operation in business.

The most applicable point Harnish makes that I can appropriate for my own use as a 1099 contractor in the real estate business is to write
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Krzysztof Karolczak
Feb 09, 2019 rated it it was amazing
Rarely do I mark and highlight things in books - after reading Scaling Up I've ended up with tons of notes, post-its and underlined paragraphs. The author does a great job of compiling a set of tools which I found extremely useful and I believe anyone scaling the company beyond 50 people will do too.

The book is structured around 4 sections - People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash challenging the management team to evaluate the company 'maturity' in those fields. The content in each section is
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Adam Nowak
Jun 11, 2018 rated it it was amazing
Shelves: audiobook, 2018
I was a bit sceptic about this one, but it's really really good, actually:)
Max rating for great content and enforcing my brain to think a lot!
Joshua Francia
Feb 26, 2018 rated it it was amazing
Shelves: business
Awesome, simple way to explain what a business is about. Great to put in practice right away
Richard Podsada
I haven't gone through all of the book, but honestly at this point I'm doubting I will... Why?

1) This book has enough acronyms to make the military jealous. The author seems to create one for every single tool, sheet and concept in the book. This may be a shallow reason to not like the book, but it got on my nerves and became a distraction pretty quickly.

2) I own (and love) the original Rockefeller Habits, and while this book has some updated tools, charts, but so far I haven't felt that I've
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Todd  Dashley
Feb 25, 2018 rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition
This book was given to me by the President of our organization. Every January we meet as a executive team at our HQ in Portland OR. Each year our President identifies a resource that addresses our current and future issues. Our national company was founded in 2004 and has gone from $4 million in sales revenue in our first year, to over $300 million last year.

This book's principles to growth and scaling up allowed us to come together last month and identify a measurable path to scaling up!
Judd
Jan 17, 2015 rated it really liked it
Shelves: 2015
Well worth the read. Great refresher on a number of topics and good learnings on others. There's no fluff here, only meaty content that is not just thorough, but useful... tangible learnings and tools you can use straight away. Keep it on your shelf and pull it down as a reference or a reminder.
Brendan Brooks
Jan 23, 2017 rated it really liked it
Shelves: business, non-fiction
Most excellent, plenty of tools and resources to implement and frameworks to guide thinking. Very practical.
deleted d
Sep 29, 2015 rated it it was ok
Scaling up
One main point, quite obvious imo

Scaling your company is risky and not necessarily better
Michał Korba
Jan 04, 2018 rated it it was amazing
good manual how to organise company on level form startup to company
Dan
Jul 19, 2016 rated it it was ok
Not an exciting read, but lots of practical advice - very similiar concepts from Good to Great by Jim Collins. I will revisit this book with a finer tooth comb when it comes time for application.
May Ling
Jul 22, 2019 rated it it was amazing
Shelves: business
This book was recommended by a friend and I must say, it's pretty good. My major criticism is the organization of the book is a little off. There is just framework over framework over framework when I think it could have been simplified quite a bit.

There are really two main points I took away. The first is that great leaders must set priorities. It then is highly tactical on how to do that. The second has to do with how to manage people toward those common priorities. If that's the case, then
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Angela Lam
Feb 03, 2019 rated it really liked it
Recommends it for: entrepreneurs, business leaders, consultants
This is like a practical textbook that promises a step-by-step process to help you grow your company 10x.

It consolidate various tips and ideas from a range of books and authors, strung together by the 4D framework with lots of DIY forms and processes. It doesn’t really explain the concepts/background in detail, but touches on the key ideas (then refers to the books where they came from). The bulk of the book is dedicated to walking you through the steps for using their free worksheets and tools
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Tim
Nov 07, 2019 rated it really liked it
Shelves: business
This book is part a survey of the best business books, part an advertisement for the author's consultancy, and part good advice based on lived experience reading and consulting. It would be worth the purchase price of the book just for the reading list in the references section. Seriously, read 'em all. On the other hand, there are a plethora of success anecdotes that can be skimmed over.

There are, generally speaking, two kinds of people in the world: those who are process-oriented, and those

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Robert Postill
Jan 15, 2020 rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition
Shelves: business, got-it, startups
Hrm, this is an odd book. I struggled with the star rating and what to say here.

So the book is a set of guidelines for startups/scaleups. In that, it is very effective. So much so that I have put the book into service at work a couple of times already.

However, there are two significant failings that fall out of the book. Particularly on the first read-through. The most serious of those is the survivor bias that exists in the book. It is (and should be) the distillation of business consulting by
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Jbo
Jan 16, 2019 rated it liked it
I am shocked at how high of a rating this book has received.

Although it provides some strong suggestions on how you can help your business grow in the future, there was far too much fluff and "see, here's an instance where this worked" and too little information on the "how" of implementing.

Example:
1) here's an idea
2) here's a company that had productivity skyrocket after doing this
3) here's a new idea
4) here's a company that increased its sales

Half of the booked seemed like items 2/4 and
...more
Vernita Naylor
First there was Verne Harnish’s Best Seller: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and now, after 12 years, Verne has revised his popular first book with Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0). It’s power-packed with a wealth of information as to how familiar and iconic companies were able to scale up. Verne offers case studies, charts, plans, and principles that companies have created within their companies to obtain their desired outcome. Business ...more
Angelica
Nov 28, 2018 rated it really liked it
Absolutely does what it says on the tin. Gives an extraordinarily clear blueprint to successfully scaling up a business, complete with accompanying handy worksheets.

The only reason I’m not giving it five stars is that I haven’t (yet?!) put the principles into practice. Based on my experience leading 10x growth, however, much of it rings true.

I particularly enjoyed the rich referencing to other work — both work that I already know and respect, like Good to Great*, and work that I haven’t heard of
...more
Scott Wozniak
Oct 31, 2018 rated it really liked it
What makes this book good is the very reason I'm giving four stars instead of five. It's full of the checklists, models, and methods of the best authors and consultants. Every few pages there's another recommendation for a book you should read and the summary of that book's big ideas. So, there's a ton of material packed into this book. But there's not a lot of original material in this book and none of the ideas are fleshed out fully.

If you're interested in a survey of the best thoughts on
...more
Morten Kaasik
Jul 02, 2019 rated it it was amazing
A great read on how to scale up a business or even your personal life. Some insights from the book make so much sense that it makes me wonder why everyone is following these tips?

Key question a leader should ask himself - “Do you have the “right people doing the right things right” inside the organization?”

Nr. 1 that has to be in place in your company; “1. The executive team is healthy and aligned.”

Two brilliant quotes from two great minds about the power of determination and hard work.
“To
...more
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