Hayagreeva Rao – författare

Scaling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It’s how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It’s how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it’s how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn’t know how to scale up what is best within it won’t achieve long-term success. Bestselling author Robert Sutton and his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao have devoted nearly a decade to uncovering what it takes to create and spread outstanding performance, and in Scaling Up Excellence they share the fruits of their research. Drawing on case studies that range from Silicon Valley enterprises to non-profit organisations, they provide crucial insights into corporate cultures, both good and bad, and offer a road map for establishing and stimulating excellence. In the process, they show how to use ‘premortems’ when making big decisions about change. They reveal why seven is so often the magic number when it comes to team size. They examine successful and unsuccessful quests for improvement – in hospitals, schools and elsewhere. And they discuss when a single corporate mindset is best (‘Catholicism’) and when local variation is preferable (‘Buddhism’). Scaling Up Excellence is the first management book devoted to what is – or should be – a core priority for every organisation. As such it is destined to become the standard bearer.

Conspiracy theories are as old as society^—^but never have they spread so fast or so visibly. In an age of social media, moments of crisis and conflict ignite waves of conspiratorial storytelling that reshape how people interpret events, assign blame, and mobilize action.Ctrl+Alt+Doubt offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions^—^stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Using tools from distributional semantics, they map the semantic space of conspiracy talk and show how meanings are assembled, recombined, and diffused online.Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage: people tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags^—^revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements.By foregrounding language and interaction, Ctrl+Alt+Doubt bridges cultural sociology, computational linguistics, and diffusion theory^—^offering a powerful framework for understanding how conspiracy theories spread and how interventions might be designed to blunt their social harm.

Conspiracy theories are as old as society^—^but never have they spread so fast or so visibly. In an age of social media, moments of crisis and conflict ignite waves of conspiratorial storytelling that reshape how people interpret events, assign blame, and mobilize action.Ctrl+Alt+Doubt offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions^—^stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Using tools from distributional semantics, they map the semantic space of conspiracy talk and show how meanings are assembled, recombined, and diffused online.Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage: people tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags^—^revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements.By foregrounding language and interaction, Ctrl+Alt+Doubt bridges cultural sociology, computational linguistics, and diffusion theory^—^offering a powerful framework for understanding how conspiracy theories spread and how interventions might be designed to blunt their social harm.

Great individuals are assumed to cause the success of radical innovations--thus Henry Ford is depicted as the one who established the automobile industry in America. Hayagreeva Rao tells a different story, one that will change the way you think about markets forever. He explains how "market rebels"--activists who defy authority and convention--are the real force behind the success or failure of radical innovations. Rao shows how automobile enthusiasts were the ones who established the new automobile industry by staging highly publicized reliability races and lobbying governments to enact licensing laws. Ford exploited the popularity of the car by using new mass-production technologies. Rao argues that market rebels also establish new niches and new cultural styles. If it were not for craft brewers who crusaded against "industrial beer" and proliferated brewpubs, there would be no specialty beers in America. But for nouvelle cuisine activists who broke the stranglehold of Escoffier's classical cuisine in France, there would have been little hybridization and experimentation in modern cooking. Market rebels also thwart radical innovation.Rao demonstrates how consumer activists have faced down chain stores and big box retailers, and how anti-biotechnology activists in Germany penetrated pharmaceutical firms and delayed the commercialization of patents. Read Market Rebels to learn how activists succeed when they construct "hot causes" that arouse intense emotions, and exploit "cool mobilization"--unconventional techniques that engage audiences in collective action. You will realize how the hands that move markets are the joined hands of market rebels.

Scaling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It’s how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It’s how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it’s how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn’t know how to scale up what is best within it won’t achieve long-term success. Bestselling author Robert Sutton and his Stanford colleague Huggy Rao have devoted nearly a decade to uncovering what it takes to create and spread outstanding performance, and in Scaling Up Excellence they share the fruits of their research. Drawing on case studies that range from Silicon Valley enterprises to non-profit organisations, they provide crucial insights into corporate cultures, both good and bad, and offer a road map for establishing and stimulating excellence. In the process, they show how to use ‘premortems’ when making big decisions about change. They reveal why seven is so often the magic number when it comes to team size. They examine successful and unsuccessful quests for improvement – in hospitals, schools and elsewhere. And they discuss when a single corporate mindset is best (‘Catholicism’) and when local variation is preferable (‘Buddhism’). Scaling Up Excellence is the first management book devoted to what is – or should be – a core priority for every organisation. As such it is destined to become the standard bearer.