I’m sure that John List did not intend for his new book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale, to raise foundational questions about American capitalism. A University of Chicago economist who served on former US president George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and as the chief economist for both Uber and Lyft, List has built an impressive career in behavioral economics. Drawing on that experience, he offers The Voltage Effect as a manual to achieve “voltage”—the power to take an idea from small to large scale. “The path from early promise to widespread impact requires one thing and one thing only: scalability—the capacity to grow and expand in a robust and sustainable way,” List contends. “You can only change the world at scale.”

Yet The Voltage Effect can’t quite escape the gravitational pull of politics. Scale is freshly problematic nowadays, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle increasingly agitated by unregulated Big Tech companies having too much market power. List, however, isn’t seeking to flatter tech billionaires. His rebuke of the “great man” theory of economic growth—the idea that enterprises succeed on the genius of singular founders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—emerges in his book. List suggests instead that success at scale is a collective social achievement—a product of institutional design and how it coordinates large numbers of employees to work together effectively.

List devotes the first half of the book to the most common pitfalls in scaling up and how to avoid them: Watch out for false positives; don’t mistake your initial audience for who your audience will be at scale; know whether your success rests on the “ingredients” or the “chef”; watch out for spillover effects; and avoid diseconomies of scale—instances where per-unit costs either increase or remain unchanged as an enterprise scales. The book’s second half presents four best practices to achieve what he calls “high voltage scaling”: incentivizing employees to spot pitfalls like false positives early on; focusing on the productivity of the next marginal dollar; knowing when to quit an idea that isn’t working; and building an institutional culture that will succeed at scale.

Read the full article about scaling up by Jeff Spross at Stanford Social Innovation Review.