Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't book club questions

1. 1.

   Harnish organizes scaling challenges into People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. Which of these four is the current constraint in a company you know well, and why?

2. 2.

   What makes a daily huddle work, and what makes it fail? Have you seen one that genuinely improved team alignment, or one that became a compliance ritual without value?

3. 3.

   The One-Page Strategic Plan is a compression exercise. What gets lost when you compress strategy to one page, and what gets gained?

4. 4.

   Harnish argues that most scaling failures are people failures before they are strategy failures. What is the evidence that a company's growth is being limited by its leadership team?

5. 5.

   How do you maintain culture as a company grows from a team where everyone knows each other to one where most people have never met the founders?

6. 6.

   The Pattern of Excellence — understanding what your best customers have in common — is essentially a customer segmentation exercise. How precise do you need to be for it to be actionable?

7. 7.

   Harnish draws from Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, and others. Where does Scaling Up add something new, and where does it mostly synthesize existing frameworks?

8. 8.

   Cash flow as a scaling constraint: many profitable companies run out of cash during fast growth. How do you build a cash model that accounts for this before it becomes a crisis?

9. 9.

   Meeting rhythms are designed to create alignment. What is the minimum set of meetings a scaling company actually needs, and what does excessive meeting culture look like?

10. 10.

    Scaling Up is written for CEOs and leadership teams of fast-growth companies. How applicable is it for leaders of divisions within larger organizations, or for organizations that are not growing quickly?

11. 11.

    How does Scaling Up compare to Traction in terms of what companies it's best suited for and what it actually helps them do?

How to run the discussion

• Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
• Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
• Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
• Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.