Learning to Scale: The Secret to Growing a Fast and Resilient Company

by Régis Medina, Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle (Preface)

Turn your company into a faster, coherent and highly adaptive organization, with a model honed over decades by giants such as Amazon, Toyota and Pixar, and now adapted to modern startups and scale-ups. As your startup grows past a few dozen employees, the “big company disease” starts creeping in. Customers complain about quality issues, everything feels slower than before, employees are less engaged and departments start to fight over resources. And when the business environment starts shifting, you find it increasingly difficult to keep everybody working in concert to adapt to the new situation. How can you keep growing while preserving the energy of the early days? This book presents a proven model, first developed by Toyota and then used by giants such as Amazon or Pixar. This model has brought impressive results across industries, from manufacturing to healthcare, from IT to operations, all over the globe. It also inspired Agile methodologies and the Lean Startup — but however successful these approaches, they only scratched the surface of what was possible. Régis Medina has spent the last 10 years adapting this model to the specific world of startups and scale-ups, working with more than a hundred teams and dozens of executives, and covering the main activities of a operations, customer support, product development, sales, marketing, human resources, finance, etc. For the first time, he presents the whole approach in a compact and actionable format, designed for modern companies. This book covers many of the questions that every CEO or manager What makes this approach revolutionary is that, contrary to most management theories, it is not a blueprint for organizing work or optimizing processes. It is a complete enterprise model built on how people learn and grow everyday at work. It is based on a simple but powerful when people better understand what they do and why, they’re better at everything they touch and the company moves faster. This book is for CEOs, C-level executives, managers and team leaders who want to build a word-class organization. "A powerful mental model that helps me find improvement ideas on the field that I could not see before. It also provides an important cultural element to keep everyone aligned and engaged in a fast-growing company."
— Steve Anavi, co-founder & CEO @ Qonto “The practices described in this book are part of the DNA of Theodo and have helped us grow tenfold over a four-year period, while remaining a “best place to work” for our employees."
— Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle, co-founder @ Theodo “After 8 years of steady growth, it was becoming hard to live up to our high quality standards, and problems kept emerging everywhere. The practices described in this book have helped me transform the company into a faster, customer-obsessed and learning organization.”
— Jonathan Vidor, founder & CEO @ JVWEB

Genres: Business, Management

314 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2020

Reviews

[Alex-Adrien Auger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book.
A la hauteur de l'homme qui l'a écrit.
C'est un véritable manuel de défense contre la Big Company Disease.
Mais comme tout manuel, il reste à résoudre les problèmes qu'il soulève. Comme disait Jonathan B, "Ce n'est pas parce qu'on a la recette qu'il n'y a plus à faire le gateau".

[Marek Kalnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been using this book daily since I opened it first time. It's comprehensive and pretty complete list of Lean tools, organised according to Michael Balle's Lean Strategy framework. It has a "bullet-list" feel to it, most of the tools are described in a succinct way.

This makes it a perfect book for two kind of people :
- someone who is already practicing Lean and needs a refresher on the tools
- someone who is trying to push the company forward on Lean path and needs a clear support for communicating with the rest of the team.

[THIAGO TORRES · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best business book I've read this year!

[Fabrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lean Learning System for tech companies

This book is a game-changer.

I have been lucky to practise many of the counter-intuitive ideas explained in this book. But until now the only books I could refer people to were very dense and the examples mostly from the manufacturing industry, such as the lean Manager or the lean strategy by Michael Ballé. Régis does a great job at making the ideas easier to digest and uses examples from the tech industry that make it much more straightforward to translate lean thinking to the context of modern tech companies.

I recommend it to every founder and CxO of startups and scale ups.

[Yannick Grenzinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good and straightforward overview of Lean philosophy and practices.
If you want to discover and apply quickly Lean methodology without chitchat this is the book you need (clearly the style is the complete opposite of the typical storytelling business book you can find).
It can also be a good book to convince people who don't want to take time to read long and deeper books.

However there is also some drawbacks:
- people needed to be convinced before going the Lean way will lack the argumentation why they should do it
- the tools and practices are presented in a succinct way. It's surely enough to start and experiment but not enough to know how to use them (or not to use them)

[Roman Mkrtchian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book presents lean as a global strategy to how a company approaches work, striving to adhere closely to the Toyota method. The key concept is learning, all the time and at every level.

It is quite concise (the text content equates to about 150 pages), thereby allowing one to grasp the essence of lean rather quickly. However, it consequently lacks examples or case studies.

It appears to be a book designed as a manual to which one would regularly refer, with a particular emphasis on the formatting of the content.

[Artur Matos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. Most books on lean out there are still very tied to manufacturing and are difficult to apply to other contexts like software. This books brings a fresh approach which is much more suitable to software and services while keeping to the spirit of lean.