The Scale-Up Paradox - by Mark Logan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Why do villages become more productive as they scale into towns and cities, whereas growing businesses experience the opposite effect?

When scaling, most ventures suffer from a loss of productivity. The higher employee count becomes, the less productive the organisation. 1,000 people do not produce efficiency gains ten times greater than a workforce of 100.

The Scale-Up Paradox explains why this happens and how your team can recover. Authored by an entrepreneur and academic with over 25 years' senior leadership experience in the tech start up and scale-up sectors, this book shows how the loss of frontline agency results from structural and operational dynamics that emerge predictably as organisations expand.

Organizational inflection points are triggered when one or more components of the organization - its people, structures or processes - scales out: it ceases to function effectively for the current size of the business. Productivity loss is a serious and abrupt issue for entrepreneurs: most businesses that enter inflection points never exit them. They stagnate, exhaust their funding and fail.

Prof Mark Logan presents a sequenced implementation framework which can be adopted progressively within existing businesses, explicitly designed for building and protecting agency.

The Scale-Up Paradox draws on the author's direct experience of scaling businesses from early stage to successful exit, work in which he has advised over 200 scaling startups across multiple sectors. The knowledge shared in this engaging book has been forged and refined through repeated practical application in resource-constrained environments, where building teams that outperform their much larger competitors was a survival requirement.

About the Author

Mark Logan is Professor of Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Glasgow, UK, as well as Senior Enterprise Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and Visiting Professor at Glasgow School of Art. Mark is also Entrepreneur in Residence at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Co-Founder of scale-up consultancy firm Ipso-Facto Management.
Mark is former Chief Entrepreneurial Advisor to the Scottish Government, where he directly advised senior ministers on entrepreneurial stimulation policy. He authored Scotland's national tech start-up strategy, which was later fully adopted as policy and replicated by other governments.