Scaling Our Organizations: The Key To Creating Massive Impact In The World
I enjoy learning. Making time to sit down, taking a new piece of paper to think about something, unlearning stuff, and re-thinking something again.
I recently went back to school, this time to Stanford University, and started my journey as a student of the Graduate School of Business for the eleventh cohort of the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative Education-Scaling Program, to grow my latest startup, Glass.
Stanford and the Latino Business Network Action (LBAN) started this program because even though Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the United States small business ecosystem, only 3% of those businesses are scaled (meaning that they make more than $1 MM dollars in annual gross revenues).
Glass is privileged to have made it to that top 3% in less than 3 years, but there’s still a lot to learn, unlearn, and discover in order to continue growing and to help many more Latinos cross that bridge.
I joined Stanford and LBAN’s quest to double the number of $10 Million, $100 Million, and $1 Billion dollars Latino-owned businesses in the United States, by 2025.
Today I’ll share with you some business basics I learned a couple of months ago, hoping this information can bring you clarity on your mission to scale your organization.
First off, do you understand what “scaling” means? In the words of professor Huggy Rao, scaling is about “smart subtraction instead of mindless addition”. Meaning that, before you add a lot of something so you can replicate what initially worked for your startup or organization, you need to identify what isn’t useful anymore, and eliminate what stands in the way of growth.
Professor Rao is a Social Scientist, a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is also the co-author with Robert I. Sutton of the book “Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less”, which I started reading recently.
In his experience, what got your organization to a given point won’t get it to its next level, because “scaling up an organization is not about replicating, but about spreading and sustaining a mindset”. What mindset? The mindset that allows our teams to experiment and come up with the next set of milestones way beyond our comfort zone, making it clear for everyone that we’re not only surviving, but thriving at what we do.
Is scaling my next personal milestone?
This is a great question that I’ve never asked myself before. I’ve co-created public and private organizations (the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court and drone delivery pioneer Matternet, in 2011). I’ve co-created federal regulation (use of drones in the United States, in 2016), and enabled public-private partnerships (Hyperloop systems, in 2018), all from scratch.
I’ve established physical and digital infrastructure (first authorized drone delivery network over cities and people, in 2017), and I’ve unlocked critical real-world use cases of exponential technologies (pilot to prove the use of drones to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, in partnership with UNICEF, in 2016).
I intuitively know how to put the pieces together and create things that didn’t exist before. I can sort through complexity with laser-focused clarity, identify the MVPs, and apply massive action against a plan. Creating from scratch is one of my superpowers.
But what I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to do (read this again), was to scale those initiatives. I have never grown something larger than its foundational stage. Since starting a moonshot or executing on a vision of something that has never been done before or that no-one can see, is already challenging, rewarding, and visionary enough, I was already doing more than I thought I would do in a lifetime, so I’ve been stretching myself for the last 10 years, and that has been purposeful enough to keep me driven.
Until now, with Glass. I’ve taken all those initiatives from 0 to 1, how we say in Silicon Valley (check the book “From Zero To One” by Peter Thiel). I’ve also pushed some projects from 1 to 10 (initial growth). But none from 10 to 100 (exponential growth). I understand exponential technologies and I know that their nature force solutions to be 10x better, but I haven’t yet applied that know-how to lead exponential growth in my organizations.
So, now is the time to scale. How do I know? Because we made over $3.7 MM in government sales on year one after product launch, and even though we made 3,000% more than we had originally projected, once we started really talking to government users 24/7, we understood that this was the tip of the iceberg and that there’s a lot to do and build in the GovTech sector.
It is so contradictory how having better results than what you originally planned can make you feel so underwhelmed, no? But that’s because you’ve started to see the full picture, and the original moonshot now seems small. We need a larger framework of action for Glass, the larger type of plans and numbers that are somewhat scary and too ambitious to grasp. Yes, moonshot land again!
So, my next challenge is to scale Glass. I don’t know exactly how to do it, but I’ve started learning at Stanford.
Professor Rao highlights these 3 things that I’ve found fascinating to explore and understand deeper, and that might help you as you scale your organization as well.
First
That most of the time we will be “leading even when we don’t know how to lead”, making emphasis on the fact that good leadership requires curiosity, multiplied by generosity.
For professor Rao, curiosity means asking a lot of questions, and he also highlights that you can’t scale until you’re generous. These are two big concepts that I’ve just learned, so I won’t try to explain them in detail because I still haven’t quite grasped them fully.
Second
That you can not scale if you and your leadership team are not daring. Being daring in the context of an organization means that everyone feels committed with taking initiative, since you can’t grow if your team is always waiting on you to call the shots and make de challenging decisions.
He raises the following questions for you to think deeply about this:
Are you creating executive muscle in your team?
Is everyone on your team talking to the customers or just the sales department?
Do they authentically want to help customers solve their real problems, or are they just interested in selling and winning?
Third
The Wow Mindset. One aspect of growing is to feel that you’re stretching, that what you are doing is something new for you, something fresh, that you’ve never tried or done in that manner before, something that surprises you. If you don’t feel it’s new for you, if you don’t feel it as a breakthrough or “aha!” moment for you, it won’t feel like something new for others.
So, to create solutions that are innovative for others, they need to be mind-blowing discoveries for you and your team first.
Professor Rao recommends finding people who can Wow! themselves, maintaining them aligned on the vision, giving them real-time feedback so they continue improving, and keeping them engaged by caring about their personal and professional growth.
I think I’ve got the first set of actionable steps to start scaling Glass. It’s a challenge I didn’t think would come so fast , but they say that “when the student is ready, the master appears”.
Having world-changing ideas and brilliant entrepreneurs trying to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges with their organizations, but not scaling these solutions so they reach every corner in the world where they are urgently needed, is a waste of ingenuity, effort, time, and money.
If the work and the solutions are already there, we need to stretch and take the leap. And that next leap is growing those startups that are already doing good and doing well at the same time; that are closing wealth and technology gaps; that are pushing their latest technology both in developed and developing markets at once, not giving emerging markets only the breadcrumbs or making them second-class customers.
Those solutions that, like Glass, are already out there in the world, doing great things but relatively nothing compared to what they can do, need to see the light. They need to scale. Right and fast.
So, here’s to scaling so we can create a massive impact in the world, today. Let’s go!
To bolder horizons,
Paola
