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

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 company: 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 faces:

• How do we improve performance for customers without putting too much pressure on the teams?
• How do we industrialize operations in a way that does not inhibit creativity?
• How do we adapt to changing business conditions and keep relevant and profitable over time?- How do we attract and retain talent?
• How do we best combine automation and human work?
• How do we improve teamwork across teams and departments? etc.

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 idea: 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.

Reviews

"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