Scale-ups are like the teenagers of a high-potential business. When the growth spurt happens, everything gets chaotic, leading to a transformation into adulthood, the author explains.
Originally from Chennai, Vidya Murali is based near London since 2006. She has worked with companies including Amazon, Deliveroo, and Skyscanner and is currently a leadership coach.
The author demonstrates and delves into the problems and how she later thrived in this dynamic landscape. In this manual, she exemplifies how to navigate this landscape and how to deal with a mental breakdown, work pressure and job loss in Scale-ups.
The book states that, though many scale-ups pay well and take care of their employees well, the kind of problems that emerge in this landscape are vast.
The author guides you on how to survive, tackle, play and shine in this environment.
Full of insights
This book is a guide to ideas, techniques, nuances and a lot more to survive in a scale-up. In this book, the author shared her experience working in a scale-up.
It also guides the scale-up leaders, managers and HR. The tagline of the book is “Master the human skills needed to thrive in young, high-growth businesses. As the tagline goes, it has beneficial insights and lessons to follow.
In the introduction part of the book, the author explains that the idea for writing this book simply came out of a casual conversation with a friend in London.
Later, it led to a series of LinkedIn posts. Then, it naturally turned out as a book.
This book contains 5 parts. Each part has its own magic. From the introduction part to learning from real-life stories and then the concluding part: “Let’s focus on you.”
Practising what you expect from others
In that book, the author not only talks about toxicity patterns but also explains “how to rebuild your emotional capacity” in a separate chapter. This is a must-read chapter, as it covers the practice of “mindfulness”. She explored what mindfulness is, why it is important and how to practically follow it.
My favourite quote from the book is, “If you can’t lead your whole self – thoughts, emotions, sensations, urges – how can you lead others?”
Mindfulness helps you learn and practise this life-enhancing skill, the author says.
Lessons from real life
Vidya Murali also dwells on toxic places by citing the example of how a sincere employee was promised a promotion by the founders, but later he got to know someone else was appointed as manager. The employee, a key resource, moved out when the company was taking up a critical project.
If you are a Corporate employee bored with a multinational company and are looking for a job switch to scale-ups, then this book will be your guide. Completing this 151-page book will not take a lot of time. You can complete it in one night while on a train or bus journey or in your leisure time.