Scaling Up – Verne Harnish

Do you need a book that will help put some structure around how you approach business? Verne Harnish provides a roadmap for you.

Featuring the iconic One-Page Strategic Plan, Verne Harnish provides a robust and comprehensive process for you to follow to add structure to your business and help leaders with the desire to start Scaling Up.

 

Pros:

  • Lots of Practical Tools. Scaling Up provides great tools, like the iconic One-Page Strategic Plan, 7 Strata, Vision Summary and the SWT (Strength, Weakness and Trends) Worksheets and all are well worth digesting and spending time on. People often find the tools that are useful and start by doing what they can with a view to completing the process forms over time. Once complete, you can have great visibility into your business strategy, processes and operational strength and weaknesses all on a page and easy to digest and update.
  • Great depth. Scaling Up tackles a lot of different areas that business owners and managers need to consider. It really does go into the Why behind each key business driver, helping readers to understand and importance of the areas in question and why Harnish has included them.
  •  Super practical. Harnish understands that business processes need to be able to be implemented and make a difference to the business. Scaling Up is a full-on practical workbook for anyone looking to scale their business and achieve new heights.

 

Cons:

  • The volume of content. Scaling Up is dense, there is no other way to say it. It covers a lot and provides many diverse frameworks that you can follow. To deal with the breadth of content, people often start with one or two frameworks and apply a "do what you can" method. Subsequently revisiting the frameworks to enable reflection, revision and refinement.
  • Change is hard. Harnish asks for people to adapt and adopt a lot of change to their existing approach. From 90 day themes to daily huddles and owning key phrases. The path to success requires a disciplined response to the methods being proposed. Making changes stick is never easy and implementing such extensive change, well relies on the individual being able to get it done.

If you've read Scaling Up, or other Verne Harnish books, please leave a comment below so that others who are looking to grow can benefit from your insights.

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