Smooth Scaling : 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-free Organization

Why do some businesses “fail to scale”? Smooth Scaling offers a clear diagnosis, along with twenty practical Rituals to boost your organization’s performance and achieve frictionless growth.

Where other books on scaling focus on strategy, fundraising, or product-market fit, Smooth Scaling addresses the most pervasive and least-understood fail point that threatens to kneecap even the best-laid scaling plan: organizational friction. Expert Rob Bier reveals why organizational frictions take hold as you grow and how they slow your company down.

These growth pains are both predictable and preventable, yet they almost always take leaders by surprise. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Until now, there’s been no resource to guide executives through this challenge. As a result, they end up playing “Whack-a-Mole,” reacting to a never-ending stream of organizational, team, and people problems one at a time—only for new ones to crop up. Smooth Scaling addresses this gap, presenting a proven approach based on real-life experience and application.

Drawing on his extensive experience building high-performance organizations, Bier has created twenty foundational Rituals that integrate seamlessly into the daily habits of your company. These Rituals make your organization as frictionless as possible, allowing you to scale faster—and more sustainably—than ever before.

In Smooth Scaling, you will learn how to:

Build trust proactively across your organization
Turn your managers into a powerful driver of productivity and scalability
Build high-performance teams with the people you’ve got
Break down barriers between departments to prevent silos
Maintain a cohesive high-trust culture as you grow

Smooth Scaling is your indispensable guide to building a scalable, high-performing organization. It gives you the insights, frameworks, and tools you need to create a company that’s truly built to last.

Rob Bier is a seasoned expert in building high-performance organizations, with over twenty years’ experience in the field. He has helped over 40 scale-ups, start-ups, and growth companies to scale successfully, including eight that became unicorns or decacorns while he worked with them. He is the driving force behind Trellis Partners, a firm that supports entrepreneurs and business leaders with leadership, teaming, strategy, and execution. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of MoneySmart in Singapore. Previously he was the founder and CEO of Sparck, a fintech acquired by Citigroup, co-founder and CEO of venture capital firm antfactory, and a senior partner in the Organizational Performance practice of Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte). He also served on the Management Advisory Board of TowerBrook Capital Partners. Rob earned an engineering degree from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard. He lives in Singapore with his two dogs, Hoffmann and Rosie Bagel, and enjoys classic cars, cooking, hiking, travel, and hanging out with his kids.