Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on.

What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.

let's start with an overview of the five key steps in the Amp It Up process: raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy.

Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO), which I have eliminated at every company I've joined in the last 20 years. MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show. Because they get compensated on their personal metrics, it's next to impossible to pull them off projects.

Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Even if you're not sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway.

The questions you should ask constantly: What are we not going to do? What are the consequences of not doing something? Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day? Start compressing cycle times. We can move so much quicker if we just change the mindset. Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker, and new energy and urgency will be everywhere. Good performers crave a culture of energy.

Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership. Nobody wants to swim in glue or struggle to get things done. Some organizations slow things down by design. Change that—ASAP.

If you can't trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, all the consultants in the world can't fix that problem.

The bottom line is that great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy. That's why, in an amped up company, execution is king.