Book Review: "Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't", by Verne Harnish

"Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is king."

From "Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't" (Gazelles East Pte. Ltd., 2014, Page 221), by CEO of Gazelles Inc, Verne Harnish

Anybody can start a business, but only a few can scale one. With that truth in mind, "Scaling Up" provides not only valuable information about how to scale a business, but also creates a framework and common vernacular to support it.

The book breaks up scaling a business into four major sections, People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. With an innumerable number of keywords and charts to guide you along your journey, the author goes ahead and describes how designing a process for a business creates reliable and repeatable (not to mention desirable) results.

At the end of the book, the author relays a question about which business leaders have made it to greatness and what commonalities they have. His response was that great leaders have both an insatiable desire to learn and an unquenchable bias for action. It ties back to the beginning of his book, where he discusses how the most important habit of great people is their ability to read or otherwise process vast amounts of information. I have found that to be true as well. The smartest people I have met in my life have not been persuaded by gloss and glory but instead incorporate the knowledge of other people's experiences into their own.

Like this book review? It was inspired by those of Sam Anderson of the New York Times.