Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, 2014

The gist of the book is how to scale an organization from one location to many while maintaining the success found at the first location. Portions of this book could work for my Operations Strategy class’s lecture on scalability. I already cover a lot of information in that class on internet platforms and digital economics, but this book complements that material by focusing on scaling a real-world service organization. Chapter 2, about how much customization to allow from one location to the next, seems particularly relevant.

While the book has some really good information, it is roughly 2x too long. Many chapters are so packed with examples that it is hard to remember the message at hand. I would have edited out about half the examples, especially since many were repetitive and many were mediocre/confusing examples of the phenomena at hand.