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July 31 - August 9, 2022
amp things up dramatically. 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.
Amp It Up process: raise your standards, align your people, sharpen your focus, pick up the pace, and transform your strategy.
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.
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.
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?
“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.
Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean!
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.
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.
three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.
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.
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?
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.
Strategy can't really be mastered until you know how to execute well. That's why execution must be your first priority as a leader. Worrying about your organization's strategy before your team is good at executing is pointless. Execution is hard, and great execution is scarce—which makes it another great source of competitive advantage.
You will become a better strategist as your execution improves.
It's hard to beat a well‐executing organization, even if the strategy isn't perfect.
As you evaluate your own culture, ask yourself a few key questions. When you talk to frontline employees, do they seem energized, or does it feel like everyone is swimming in glue? Do people have clarity of purpose and a sense of mission and ownership? Do they share the same big dreams of where the organization might be in a few years? Do most people execute with urgency and pep in their step? Do they consistently pursue high standards in projects, products, talent, everything?
High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.
explain their growth model—in other words, how fast could their company grow if it optimally executed? What constraints would limit or enable their growth?
All my experiences have taught me that when in doubt, you should lean in and try to grow faster.
your leverage comes from having a strong product and a formidable ability to sell it.
“If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?” The reason is that as companies get bigger, they start advancing numerous initiatives simultaneously. Before they even realize it, people start moving like molasses and lose their sense of focus. Try to regain that by narrowing the aperture on priorities.
what's the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason?
Always be paranoid about what you are not doing but should be.
conversely, what are you doing that's of marginal value but crowding our more essential ways to use our time and resources?
Takeaway 1: Attack weakness, not strength.
Takeaway 2: Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else's.
Takeaway 3: It's much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one.
Takeaway 4: Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.
Takeaway 5: Stay close to home in the early going.
Takeaway 6: Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
Takeaway 7: Bet on the correct enabling technologies.
Takeaway 8: Architecture is everything.
Takeaway 9: Prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect.
What types of people succeed best in this company? And which do not? And why?
