Masters of Scale
Think you might want to read this book?
Think Masters of Scale has nothing to do with school? If you are thinking about how school used to be, you may be right. If you are thinking about how we might educate all children more uniformly, then you may be quite wrong. What is working well at your school or in education that might be able to scale so that it benefits all? If Salman Khan, a hedge fund analyst, could stumble upon a model that works for education, we owe it to children to think about what else might be helpful to others around the world. Masters of Scale might just guide you to an idea and then show you how to do exactly that.
What Would Socrates Ask?
What are the student experiences at your school that could potentially scale?
Are there entire classes at your school that could potentially scale?
Are there units and projects at your school that are globally marketable in some way?
Concepts
Blitzscaling: the pursuit of aggressive growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, or risk-intelligent scaling.
It’s better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you.
Negative Mentors- learn from them what not to do.
First-Principle Thinkers: the idea that everything you do is underpinned by foundational beliefs or first principles.
Compassionate Directness: being able to have tough conversations, being able to disagree - including with managers and executives of every rank - and being able to speak out when you’re upset about something or have a complaint.
Being in permanent beta: Approach everything with a new mind; seek out new challenges and new learning opportunities.
Minimum Viable Product: the most bare-bones, least-polished version of a product that can be used to test a hypothesis.
A usability test: watching or getting feedback about what the user experiences when they use your product.
Quotes from the authors
“If you want to bring something new into this world and scale it, you don’t necessarily have to be a young guy in a hoodie. You don’t need to be an engineer or programmer, or live in Silicon Valley. And you don’t need big bucks - in fact, many of the successful startups in this book becan with less than $5,000. But you do need knowledge, insight, and inspiration.”
“Fanatical users are in it for the long haul; they stand by you, they stick with you - and importantly, they tell their friends.”
“In fact, if you’re not coming across customers who say, “I love this product. It’s super important to me. I really need this to work well,” it usually means you’re off track.”
“Passionate feedback is a clue that your product really matters to someone. And one passionate user can turn into many, if you listen to them carefully.”
“And so the advice I always give founders is: Don’t ask people, ‘What do you think of my idea?’ Ask them, ‘What's wrong with my idea?’”
“If your company is dominated by one type of person, your collective blind spots will add up to tunnel vision.”
“If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released too late.”
Quotes from others
“We ran into a lot of people who were unable to see past the current paradigm and the way things had always been done.” - Kathryn Minshew, co-founder and CEO of The Muse
“If you’re starting something new and people don’t call you crazy, then you’re probably not thinking big enough.” - Endeavor’s Linda Rottenberg
At Netflix, the analogy is not to family but to a sports team. “Ultimately, it is about performance - unlike a family, which is really about unconditional love.” Reed Hastings
“You have to figure out if they’re ‘I people’ or ‘we people’. You start by asking them to talk about their accomplishments. If they talk about ‘We did this’ and ‘We did that’ as a team, you know you’ve got a pretty good fit there.” Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-founder
“Persistence is the single biggest predictor of future success. And so at Google, we would look for persistence. And the second thing was curiosity - as in, what do you care about? The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a knowledge economy.” - Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO
“Don’t hire people who can’t name anyone who ever helped them. You can figure that out by simply asking who has helped most in a candidate's career. “ If they can’t remember anyone, that’s a pretty bad sign.” - CEO and consultant Margaret Heffernan
“Managers tell people what to do. But leaders inspire them to do it.” - Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn
Gateways to further learning
Referenced books with the potential to impact leading and learning in education
The applicability of this book to education is ….
Resources
