Keen On. Scale: How To Spread Excellence From The Few To The Many

April 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Keen On… Scale: How To Spread Excellence From The Few To The Many

Posted 10 hours ago by Andrew Keen, Columnist

Bob Sutton is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential business gurus. A professor at Stanford’s Engineering School, he is the author of bestselling books like The No Asshole Ruleand Good Boss, Bad Boss.  And his latest book is Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less, which argues that what distinguishes great companies like Pixar, Twitter, Google and Facebook from dysfunctional companies like Zynga is their ability to scale their organization.

“Scale”, Sutton told me, means the “spreading of excellence from the few to the many”. And successful founders, he explains, are able to build teams around them and grow the company organically. But some companies are harder to grow than others, he says.

Indeed, Sutton even refers to something he calls “the glass cliff” at struggling companies like Yahoo, where the job is so challenging that men are scared of taking it on. Being CEO of Google is an “easy job” compared to Yahoo, he says. Marissa Mayer could easily run Google, he says; but Larry Page would struggle to run Yahoo.

So is Bob Sutton right? Is everything in Silicon Valley really about people? And are the most successful companies those that are best able to scale their organization?

 

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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