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Huggy Rao, the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has spent over forty-five years shaping the minds of some of the world’s brightest business leaders. A giant in the field of organizational behavior, his Wall Street Journal bestseller, Scaling Up Excellence, co-authored with Bob Sutton, was praised by Daniel Pink as “one of the finest business books you will ever read.” Their next collaboration, The Fiction Project, is eagerly anticipated and set to be released in January 2024.
On their latest work, Adam Grant noted, “If every leader took the ideas of this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”
Understanding the scaling of organizations, for me, can be divided into two periods: before and after meeting Huggy. Prior to him, I perceived the process of scaling people as a struggle to bridge the gap between the deeply personal yet unscalable, and the draconian coldness of process-first strategies. Huggy taught me that the struggle is the way. It is entirely acceptable and necessary to treat every individual in an organization with empathy, dignity, and respect, while simultaneously applying a scientist’s rigor, discipline, and appetite for experimentation to building and scaling organizations.
Huggy certainly practices what he preaches. He’s consistently generous with his time and is always willing to engage in thorough discussions about complex issues years after he’s met them. In this installment of My Best Advice, Huggy shares his insights on what he believes today’s business leaders should do to effectively navigate uncertainty.
Editor’s note: This is the tenth in a series of guest posts where people from all walks of life share their best advice in times like these. A big thanks to the leaders who volunteered to share their life experiences. Reflection on the past is a deeply personal exercise. The willingness to share it with the world, especially in the written form, is a commendable act of vulnerability. For this alone, they have my deepest gratitude.
My Best Advice
“How can you play your A game at work when you are recruiting your C self? Your C self is the exhausted or irritable self. Make sure you harness your best self at work—at least fifty percent of the time every day, where, for example, your curiosity and generosity blossom. Take bad friction out—prune things that distract or infuriate you. Put in good friction to slow down lest you choose a myopic version of yourself!”
