Amp It Up

Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

Frank Slootman

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119836414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller The secret to leading growth is your mindset

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.

Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model—and they don't need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day.

Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them.

Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

PART I
Amping Up

1
Introduction: The Power of Amping Up

Amp It Up

A few years ago I wrote a popular LinkedIn article, “Amp It Up,” whose main premise was that organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model. My basic advice was to keep playing your game but 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.

That article triggered thousands of likes, shares, and comments. It also led to a flood of incoming requests for sit‐downs and speaking engagements. While l love speaking to other leaders, especially entrepreneurs, and while I speak at conferences and business schools from time to time, I couldn't possibly accommodate everyone who wanted to learn more about my Amp It Up philosophy. I believe it's incumbent on leaders to share our experience with others, but doing so in small groups (let alone one‐on‐one) isn't efficient or scalable, especially when you have a consuming day job. That's why I'm writing this book: to summarize my convictions, observations, and beliefs about how to lead a mission‐driven, high‐performance company.

The concepts, strategies, and tactics you will find here were developed over my entire career but especially at the three very different companies where I served as CEO: Data Domain from 2003 to 2010, ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017, and Snowflake from 2019 to the present. At various times I've also been a venture capitalist, a board member, and a corporate executive, but no experience in business compares to being CEO. I love being fully accountable for a company's leadership, strategy, culture, and execution in an ultra‐competitive marketplace.

Things can go bad very quickly in an organization when the leadership team is weak or gets distracted. Human nature being what it is, many people will slow their output to a glacial pace and adopt “good enough” as their standard. Without focused leadership, millions of conflicting priorities compete with each other. Then the best people in the organization get frustrated and start to leave, as talent and energy go untapped and dormant. At this point you're on the path to catastrophic decline—unless you amp things up immediately.

Leadership changes can yield immediate impact long before you can carry out more structural changes in talent, organization, and strategy. You can engulf your organization with energy, step up the tempo, and start executing the basic blocking and tackling with a lot more focus and higher expectations. It will feel like busting a log jam. All of a sudden, everything is moving and shaking.

This phenomenon is not limited to business. We often see sports teams go from losing to winning from one season to the next without dramatic changes in roster. When Vince Lombardi took over as head coach of the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had just come off a 1–10 season, not to mention 11 losing seasons in row. The next year, the Packers improved to 7–5, their first winning season in many years. Then they started winning one division championship after another. Leadership really matters. It's no coincidence that to this day, winners of the Super Bowl receive a trophy named for Lombardi.

My goal for this book is to provide not merely tactical advice but also context and ways of thinking about situations. You can try these ideas on for size and see if they fit. I'm not on a mission to convince the world to agree with me. If you choose not to amp it up, that's up to you. But I believe the chapters ahead will help you stiffen your spine and fight the good fight—not just if you're a CEO but if you're a leader at any level, whether at a start‐up, a big company, or a nonprofit.

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.

The media have praised the results that my three companies have delivered over the past two decades, as we ramped up to three successful IPOs and generated hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It's hard to argue with results. But outsiders have also questioned, if not criticized, the ways in which we achieved those results. So 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.

Raise Your Standards

The late Steve Jobs was only inspired by “insanely great” things. He set a high bar for seemingly everything, and anything that didn't meet his standards was summarily rejected. Try applying “insanely great” as a standard on a daily basis and see how far you get. 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.

We should all be thrilled with what we're doing. So channel your inner Steve Jobs. Aim for insanely great. It's much more energizing!

Align Your People and Culture

Alignment becomes a more important concept as a business grows and there are many moving parts. The question is, are we all pulling on the same oar? Are we all driving in the same direction?

When I joined Snowflake, the company was being run as what I would call a pseudo‐SaaS company with a subscription model. But it's basically a utility company for cloud computing with a consumption model. As with your local electric company, you pay only for what you use. Yet, like a SaaS company, our sales force was completely focused on bookings, or sales contract value, even though Snowflake did not recognize a single revenue dollar on bookings. Only actual consumption causes revenue to be recognized. Consumption drove bookings only indirectly; as customers ran out of capacity, they would reorder. This lack of alignment was everywhere: reps only marginally cared about consumption, and many customers were oversold on bookings, which led to smaller renewals, or what we call down‐sells, in future periods. The cost of commissions was out of whack with revenues because there was no direct relationship between sales compensation and revenues.

It took a few quarters to transition the company to consumption. Consumption became our middle name. We now looked at everything through the lens of consumption. We got better alignment.

Where alignment matters further is in incentive compensation. We pay everybody the same way on our executive team, and we have a very select, focused set of metrics that we pay bonuses on. Our sales exec does not get paid on a commission plan if the rest of us aren't. Everybody knows what we are aiming for.

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. They will start negotiating with you for relief. That's not alignment, that's every man for himself. If you need MBO to get people to do their job, you may have the wrong people, the wrong managers, or both.

Sharpen Your Focus

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.

Leaders can do two things that bring almost instant benefit. 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 people have a relatively easy time coming up with their top three priorities. Just ask them. 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 exactly the point. If we are wrong, resources are misallocated. That's concerning. But we avoid these pointed dialogs because it is easier to list five or ten priorities. The right ones may not even be buried in there somewhere.

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

At ServiceNow, I had such a “what is the one thing” conversation with our new chief product officer. Product organizations have a million things to do, and they really need to elevate their thinking to see the forest for the trees. This was not a quick or easy conversation, because it's easy to lose sight of the big picture when drowning in day‐to‐day obligations. I knew what I thought the answer should be, but would the CPO see it the same way? Did he even have a top priority?

What we arrived at was a singular focus on fashioning our rather industrial user experience to a consumer‐grade service experience. This was not a short‐term project; it would require a long‐term shift in strategy, if not engineering culture, with sustained effort. It was important to the company's future yet also hard because it required changing our DNA. Our customers were IT people who had a high tolerance for these rather industrial, not very user‐friendly experiences. The company had to forcibly move itself away from where it had come from. Having clarity is key, or people will just chip away at a problem, without significantly moving the needle. Intentions are often good, but they are then under‐prioritized, under‐resourced, and not fully crystalized.

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?

Pick Up the Pace

In a troubled organization there's no rush, no urgency. Why? People have to be there anyway, so what's the point in moving faster? If you have ever seen the inside of a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), you know what that looks like. The staff doesn't start moving till 4:00 p.m. because quitting time is 4:30 p.m., and that backlog has to get cleared so everybody can depart on time. The rest of the day, who cares? They have to be there anyway.

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.

It's not a one‐time thing; it's not an email or a memo. It's using every encounter, meeting, and opportunity to increase t...