Scale at Speed: How to Triple the Size of Your Business and Build a Superstar Team

Researched means all necessary reading, research and discussion into the approach has been completed, and the approach agreed with the rest of the GLT either in a weekly catch-up or ad hoc.

In my view managers should be incentivised based on the performance of their team (tracked and assessed through scorecards, covered in a later chapter) and on their own scorecards.

an A-player is: ‘a candidate who has at least a 90 per cent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 per cent of possible candidates could achieve.’

one of the most important, beautifully elegant and multi-dimensional questions you can ask any prospective candidate at interview: ‘So, John, what will your last three bosses – what were their names again? – tell me when I ask them what your weaknesses were?’

I have often found that one company’s C-player is another company’s A-player – context, cultural fit and relevant personal motivation are critical to performance after all.

Each quarter is therefore broken down monthly into Month 1: Researched; Month 2: Prototyped; and Month 3: Delivered.

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff, which focuses solely on how to make use of this lizard brain to formulate and win pitches. It is, I think, the single best book on selling I have read, because it focuses not on the processes but on the motivations that drive the decision.

Today most of the companies I work with double or triple in size in their first eighteen to twenty-four months of using the formula.

the first rule in Harvard Business Review’s guide for managers is, ‘Hire people who are better than you and let them get on with it.’