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.

I also believe that you can only get these insights from a fellow traveler. No offense to my VC friends, but they often think that their investments give them the right to lecture entrepreneurs at board meetings, even though many VCs have never been in the combat seat themselves. Having seen things done is not the same as doing them.

People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don't do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way. It doesn't take much more mental energy to raise standards. Don't let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.

Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It's okay,” or “It's not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn't the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.

Organizations are often spread too thinly across too many priorities, and too many of them are ill defined. Things tend to get added to the pile over time, and before we know it, we have huge backlogs. We're spread a mile wide and an inch deep. The problems with pace and tempo are, of course, related to having too much going on at the same time. It feels like swimming in glue, moving like molasses.

First, think about execution more sequentially than in parallel. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Even if you're not sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway. The process alone will be enlightening. Figure out what matters most, what matters less, and what matters not at all. Otherwise your people will disagree about what's important. 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. Most

As an exercise I often ask: if you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, and nothing else, what would it be and why? People struggle with this question because it is easy to be wrong, which is exactl...

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

Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean! If priorities are not clearly understood at the top, how distorted will they be down the line?

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.

We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime. They will be motivated and driven, with a cannot‐fail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us.

Perhaps, look for the same career‐frustrated person I had been all these years. It was quite satisfying to turn this into a high‐powered strategy to drive business. I ended up with better, cheaper, more loyal, more motivated talent than we would have with a conventional hiring mentality. It does come with risk, but there is always risk in hiring. I have misfired with great resumes plenty of times.

As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.

Now let's look at the three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.

The mission also has to be treated with urgency. There is a saying in sales that “time kills all deals.” Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants. The faster we separate from the competition, the more likely we are to succeed. Urgency is a mindset that can be learned if it doesn't come to you naturally. You can embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it.

Mission driven is not just what you believe, it's how you make decisions every day about your time and effort and resources. It's about delivering on your most important promises, not racking up style points. It's about making choices during every meeting and every interaction. Grinding away toward your mission, day in and day out, will absolutely pay off.

Good leaders explain that none of us are ever truly safe in our roles for any length of time. If this fact makes people uncomfortable, that's good. You need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because the only alternative is denialism.

The legal system will always be exploited by those who cannot compete on merit. The legality of a business tactic doesn't matter; it's all about what people can get away with.

Another human tendency is to approach things incrementally, from an abundance of caution. It feels safer to inch forward rather than take bold leaps. Incrementalism is about avoiding risk by building on whatever has already been achieved as a stable foundation. But merely trying for marginal improvements on the status quo carries its own risks.

But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won't lose, but you won't win either. Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That's why very few enterprises that were in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend

Rather than seeking incremental progress from the current state, try thinking about the future state you want to reach and then work backward to the present. What needs to happen to get there? This exercise can be inspiring and motivating, as you become guided by your future vision. Don't try to steer the ship by looking at its wake!

In too many internal meetings, managers articulate their goals in terms of the delta from where they are today. “We want to have 30% more customers in two years.” That sounds safe and respectable, but why not 100% more? Why not 1000%? How big is this market? Are you planning to go from 1% to 1.3% share? If so, what would it take to get to 5% or 10%

Why did eBay not become Amazon? Why did IBM not become Microsoft? Why didn't taxi companies invent Uber? Why didn't Hilton or Marriott invent Airbnb? Why didn't Oracle invent Snowflake? Why didn't BMC invent ServiceNow? Why didn't tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn't Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.

Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential. So what if you don't get there? At least you went for it! Don't settle for respectable mediocrity; seek to exploit every ounce of potential you are entrusted with. If you want to win big, imagine a radically different future that is not tethered to the past. This is why innovation always seems to come from the least expected places. They don't have a past to care about. They have nothing to lose, no ships to burn behind them.

Another lesson from these examples: attacking markets that have weak, unpopular incumbents is infinitely easier than chasing strong, popular occupants. Customers do not easily part with products that do the job for them. They have enough on their plate already. You need massive, not marginal differentiation, or they will simply filter you out as noise.

Do an unsentimental evaluation of what resources and staff you have versus how much you really need. There is usually more performance and efficiency to be gained from your existing staff, before you take the path of least resistance—unplanned, incremental growth, leading to mediocrity and waste. One of your biggest responsibilities is to stop that incremental attitude in its tracks.

If you don't know how to execute, every strategy will fail, even the most promising ones. As one of my former bosses observed: “No strategy is better than its execution.”

Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences. It's also vitally important—yet very difficult—to maintain your intellectual honesty. Can you see things as they really are and fully appreciate what is happening? Human nature has a strong tendency to rationalize situations, to convince us that no significant changes are necessary. Reality can rattle us, making us nervous and uncomfortable. To cope with the stress, we talk ourselves into a less damning interpretation. This is why groupthink and confirmation bias are common and incredibly dangerous to the well‐being of the enterprise. It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.

You may be horribly wrong and need to bail on it. As Scott McNealy famously said, “fail fast”—the sooner the better. We sometimes use the expression “that dog won't hunt”—not in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn't working, no matter what we do. It's hard to say that if you're irrationally attached to a strategy.

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

“Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch.”

That's why, in an amped up company, execution is king.

Hire Drivers, Not Passengers, and Get the Wrong People off the Bus Drivers Wanted

Passengers are people who don't mind simply being carried along by the company's momentum, offering little or no input, seemingly not caring much about the direction chosen by management. They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers. They are often accepted into the fabric of the organization and stay there for many years. The problem is that while passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem quite well, they have no investment in solving it. They don't do the heavy lifting. They avoid taking strong positions at the risk of being wrong about something. They can take any side of an issue, depending on how the prevailing winds are blowing. In large organizations especially, there are many places to hide without really being noticed.

Drivers, on the other hand, get their satisfaction from making things happen, not blending in with the furniture. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from both themselves and others. They exude energy, urgency, ambition, even boldness. Faced with a challenge, they usually say, “Why not” rather than “That's impossible.”

These qualities make drivers massively valuable. Finding, recruiting, rewarding, and retaining them should be among your top priorities. Recognize them privately and publicly, promote them, and elevate them as example of what others should aspire to. That will start waking up those who are merely along for the ride. Celebrate people who own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and seek to move the dial.

This line of inquiry has other benefits. Employees should be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel strongly that they matter to the organization, that they contribute in significant ways, that their absence would significantly hurt its results. If they can say those things honestly, they will feel far more secure and confident in their own value. It will also advance their careers at any company that recognizes and rewards

such situations, at any level of a company, the first order of business is sorting out the valuable people from the deadweight (including but not exclusively those with a passenger attitude). Then you have to do what Jim Collins described in Good to Great as moving the wrong people off the bus and putting the right ones on the bus, in the right seats. In that order.

The other advantage of moving fast is that everyone who stays on the bus will know that you're dead serious about high standards. The good ones will be energized by those standards. If others start looking for greener, less‐demanding pastures because they don't want to meet those standards, that's fine too. I know this philosophy may come across as harsh. But what's even harsher is not doing the job you were hired to do as a leader. If

High‐growth enterprises are not easy places to live. The pressure is relentless. Performance is aggressively managed. There is no let up. I have seen employees depart after a short time because the intensity and pace just wasn’t their cup of tea. Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose. It’s unlikely that a strong, effective, and mission‐aligned culture will please everybody.

I've been in companies that thought employees should be number one because they reasoned that well‐treated employees would therefore treat customers the best. Why be indirect about it? We don't have any reason to exist without our customers.

At Data Domain, we saw many of our competitors second‐guessing their strategy and tweaking their plans for no good reason. We left them behind at least in part because we didn't do that. We kept our heads down, trusted our strategy, and focused on getting better and better at executing it.

Even those who have never interacted with X will hear through the grapevine that X is abusive, unscrupulous, dishonest, or whatever the problem might be. If such behavior goes unaddressed—or even worse, if it is rewarded with a promotion for delivering strong business results—people across the company will conclude that the values and the inspirational posters are bullshit. Everyone will know that the real, unspoken culture is “Do whatever you want, as long as you make your numbers.”

Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences. If you want a strong culture, you will have to make hard decisions to let certain people go for the greater good. There's no way to avoid those cases.

Not surprisingly, his answer was his sales team. The answer I was hoping for, however, was his leadership peer group, meaning his counterparts in engineering, marketing, finance, services, and so on, because that's the team that really runs any company. The sales team by itself is a just one silo within the bigger organization.

Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos.

Personally, I considered it a failure on my part if executives had to come to me to adjudicate.

But if you as the leader keep stressing the importance of going direct, you can break everyone's habit of staying within silos. After a while, people will engage laterally just as easily as they do inside their own teams.

Hiring decisions are naturally fraught with bias because so many human qualities are impossible to measure objectively. It's forgivable that some hiring decisions end up as failures, but what's not forgivable is refusing to recognize, acknowledge, and take action on hiring mistakes. Even after decades of experience, I have repeatedly hired executives who were successful in their past roles, well respected, well liked—and nevertheless turned out to be terrible hires. It happens to all of us!