Podcast Summary: HBR On Leadership

Episode: How to Scale What’s Working at Your Company
Date: November 19, 2025
Host: Amanda Kersey (Harvard Business Review)
Guest: Bob Sutton (Organizational Psychologist, Stanford Professor, co-author of "Scaling Up Excellence")
Interviewer: Julia Kirby (Former HBR Editor at Large)

Episode Overview

This episode explores the challenge of scaling successful initiatives, behaviors, and cultures within organizations. Host Amanda Kersey introduces a rich conversation between Julia Kirby and Bob Sutton, centered around the key insights of Sutton's work on how organizations can take "a little bit of magic" from one part of a company and successfully spread it throughout, without losing or diluting that excellence in the process.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding "Scaling" in Practice

Timestamps: 01:57 – 03:30

• Definition Expansion: Sutton and Rao define scaling not just as company or product growth, but as spreading "pockets of excellence"—whether that's a successful hospital department or a high-performing tech team—so that positive behaviors and successful models become the norm.
• Examples: From healthcare and education to tech start-ups and restaurants, the challenge is universal: "The problem of more...you've got a little bit of goodness and how you spread it further." (Bob Sutton, 02:23)

2. Core Principles for Scaling Excellence

Timestamps: 03:53 – 10:44

a) Ensure There’s True Excellence to Scale

"You have to have excellence to scale." (Bob Sutton, 03:59)

b) Appeal to Both Heart and Mind: “Hot Cause & Cool Solution”

• Rational arguments rarely inspire action; emotional engagement matters.
• Case: The 100,000 Lives Campaign in healthcare—by connecting a story of personal tragedy to evidence-based practices, leaders mobilized hospitals nationally for real results.
  • "They started out with a conference where there was a mother whose child had died...and a nun who made it a moral imperative." (Bob Sutton, 04:38)

c) Manage and Minimize Complexity as You Grow

• “As organizations get bigger, there’s this tendency to put on more and more process and more and more structure.” (Bob Sutton, 06:00)
• Sutton advocates for using hierarchy wisely—to build helpful bureaucracy and destroy bad bureaucracy.
• Advice from Chris Fry: Give people "just a little less structure and a little less process than you think they need" (07:01).

d) Don't “Spread Like Peanut Butter” – Create Robust Pockets, Then Cascade

• Excellence spreads through building strong outposts of success, which then mentor and seed improvements elsewhere.
• Case: Kaiser Permanente rolled out electronic medical records region by region, using successful teams to train the next.
  "You don’t spread it like a thin coat of peanut butter... pockets are developed, made wonderful, and then spread to the next pocket, often by the people who developed it in the first place." (Bob Sutton, 08:13)

e) Eliminate the Bad Before Spreading the Good

• "Good to great is nice, but bad to great is really the sign of what it takes to spread excellence." (Bob Sutton, 09:26)
• Removing toxic behaviors and underperformance is usually the critical first step.
• Example: Turnaround at Cost Plus retail chain—addressing basic customer service and removing problematic employees laid vital groundwork. (09:48)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “To scale excellence, you have to have excellence to scale.” (Bob Sutton, 03:59)
• “Link a hot cause to a cool solution.” (Bob Sutton, 04:27)
• “Give people just a little less structure and a little less process than you think they need.” (Chris Fry, via Bob Sutton, 07:01)
• “You don’t spread it like a thin coat of peanut butter.” (Bob Sutton, 08:13)
• “The first job of a manager is to get rid of the bad stuff. If you want to spread excellence.” (Bob Sutton, 10:40)

Pitfalls & Patterns of Failure

Timestamps: 11:38 – 13:54

• Focusing on Numbers Over Mindset: “…when people start focusing on running up the numbers rather than spreading a mindset, that's when they really get in trouble.” (Bob Sutton, 11:49)
• Sustaining culture is crucial as organizations scale.
• Successful Practice: Facebook's boot camp for engineers—instilling culture and mindset is prioritized over merely onboarding talent.
  • “The purpose of the boot camp is essentially to kind of basically instill the Facebook mindset in you…” (Bob Sutton, 12:47)

The Leader’s Mindset for Scaling

Timestamps: 13:54 – 15:49

• Persistence & Patience: Scaling is a long, arduous process—successful leaders combine “daily impatience” (to keep momentum) with the wisdom that scaling takes time.
  • “You need that combination of daily impatience and realizing it's going to take a long time.” (Bob Sutton, 14:41)
• Start Where You Are: Successful scaling often comes from individuals acting within their sphere of influence—middle managers and team leads, not just top executives.
  • “It's not other people's responsibilities...the only way to make it happen is to start where you are with what you got.” (Bob Sutton, 15:38)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Definition & Approach to Scaling: 01:57 – 03:53
• Principles of Successful Scaling: 03:53 – 10:44
  • Hot cause, cool solution example: 04:27 – 05:54
  • Managing bureaucracy/processes: 06:00 – 08:13
  • Cascade vs. spreading thin: 08:13 – 09:26
  • Dealing with the "bad stuff": 09:26 – 10:44
• Common Scaling Mistakes: 11:38 – 13:54
• Leadership Mindset: 13:54 – 15:49

Tone and Style

The conversation is conversational, grounded, and practical, full of real-world examples and friendly humor. Sutton is candid about leadership missteps and systemic challenges but keeps the focus on actionable insights and encouragement for leaders at all levels.

Summary Takeaways

• Scaling excellence begins with verified excellence and starts small.
• Emotional commitment (“hot cause”) is as vital as logic.
• Fight the growth-driven urge to complicate—keep processes as simple as possible.
• Spread by deepening excellence in strong pockets, then using them to spark change elsewhere (“connect and cascade”).
• Systematically eliminate toxic behaviors and underperformance before trying to scale the good.
• Scaling is everyone’s challenge, not just top leaders, and requires relentless, patient action from wherever you are.
• Cultural alignment is more important than speed or scale alone.

For those attempting to spread what works within a growing organization, this episode delivers both cautionary wisdom and inspiring, step-by-step advice.