Amp It Up

Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising

Expectations, Increasing Urgency,
and Elevating Intensity
Frank Slootman
©2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Adapted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-119-83611-7
Estimated reading time of summary: 8 minutes

Key Takeaways
• People lower their standards to get things off their desks. Fight that impulse, raise the bar, and aim
for insanely great results.
• As a business grows, it becomes even more important for people to drive in the same direction.
Align your people to your corporate culture to get everyone on the same page.
• Organizations tend to be spread too thin across too many priorities. To sharpen your focus, think
about execution more sequentially and work on fewer things at the same time.
• In troubled organizations, there’s no urgency. Set the pace for your organization by compressing
cycle times and injecting new energy into your people.
• Strategy can become a force multiplier, so widen your thinking about the business model to reach
new and bigger markets.
• To amp up the momentum in your career, be purposeful. Embrace struggle, keep the endgame in
mind, and build a strong foundation to launch your career forward.

Overview
Your organization can make significant performance improvements without expensive changes to its
talent, structure, or fundamental business model. In Amp It Up, CEO Frank Slootman uses his decades
of experience as a leading tech industry executive to teach leaders at any level how to run a mission-
driven, high-performance company. His tactical advice can help you declare war on mediocracy and
transform your organization for maximum growth and scale. By applying his leadership approach, you
can align your people, execute with urgency, and move your organization down the road to success.

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Amp It Up Frank Slootman

Raise Your Standards

A clear and ambitious mission is an essential key to consistent success and growth. To nurture the mis-
sion within your organization, apply the following:

• Focus. Concentrate your resources and bandwidth on the mission to avoid distractions.
• Urgency. Use urgency to energize the workplace and keep everyone moving at the same pace.
• Execution. Drive for world-class execution to maintain any chance of accomplishing the mission.
• Strategy. Help everyone feel confident that the strategy is in line with the goals of the mission.
Being mission driven doesn’t just entail the things you believe, it’s how you make decisions every day
about your time, effort, and resources. Grinding away toward your mission will pay off, especially if part
of that mission is declaring war on your competitors and incrementalism.

Business is war, and conflict is inevitable. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to make that fact clear to
your people. If you don’t explain the industry landscape, your employees will have the illusion that
their jobs and paychecks are secure. Additionally, you must help your employees break the tendency to
approach things incrementally. Trying merely for marginal improvements on the status quo carries risks.
Instead of seeking incremental progress from the current state, think about the future state you want
to reach and work backward to the present. Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its
potential and don’t settle for respectable mediocrity.

As you drive the business forward, remember that if you can’t execute, every strategy will fail. Treat every
strategy with caution and keep in mind that great execution can make a moderately successful strategy
go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy.

Align Your People and Culture

In an amped up company, execution is key. One strategy that you must learn to execute well is separat-
ing your passengers from your drivers. Passengers are people who don’t mind being carried along by
a company’s momentum. They’re largely dead weight and can be a threat to your culture and perfor-
mance. If you don’t act quickly to get the passengers off the bus, you’ll have no chance of changing
the company’s overall trajectory. Of course, getting the wrong people off the bus is only half the chal-
lenge. You must also find and recruit the right people for the right seats. Drivers get their satisfaction
from making things happen. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and demand high
standards. Drivers are very valuable, and finding, recruiting, rewarding, and retaining them should be
among your top priorities.

Getting the right people on the bus will have a huge impact on your organization’s culture. Culture
describes how people come together as a group on a day-to-day basis. The key to driving a consistent
culture is to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values daily. If you succeed in building
and protecting a strong culture, it will attract people who admire the culture while repelling those who
find it distasteful. You should also assess the degree to which people embrace your culture, because
that will give you a huge indication of who will help the organization reach its goals and who might be
dragging you down.

As you keep adding people to your culture, your business will grow and develop functional silos. Too
many managers and executives try to maintain a shield around their silos, but a better option is “going
direct.” If you have a problem that cuts across departments, determine who in those other departments

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Amp It Up Frank Slootman

can help you address the issue and reach out without hesitation. Going direct will only work as a strat-
egy if your people default to trusting their colleagues in other departments. Trust is foundational to
team effectiveness, but it needs to be earned and developed. To build trust in your organization, be
trustworthy. Because you’re the leader, people will always monitor the variance between what you say
and what you do, so offer up an honest account of your behavior.

Sharpen Your Focus

As your company grows, sharpen your focus. Sometimes, companies become so successful in their core
businesses that they believe they can do no wrong and force their way into new ventures that are poorly
analyzed and understood. Focus on analysis by slowing down and critically examining situations before
settling on an explanation. Break problems into their most basic elements and ignore what you think
you already know.

One area to analyze is whether your company needs a customer success department. While they’re
rather popular today, an alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforce that customer suc-
cess is the business of the entire company. When a problem arises, make sure every department feels
the responsibility to fix it. Empower your primary teams to solve problems on their own and you’ll ben-
efit from a simpler, less costly, and better functioning organization.

Pick Up the Pace

When it comes to sales, there are three common managerial mistakes:

1. Trying to staff an entire sales team prematurely. Add salespeople at a very gradual pace while upgrad-
ing your product. When your product line is more formidable, you can step on the accelerator and
teach your people a systematic sales process.
2. Failing to figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers before ramping up
headcount. It’s common in early-stage companies for a small group of reps to drive most of the rev-
enue, while a larger group of flatliners fail to contribute. To avoid this, stop outsourcing your hiring
function, teach your sales executives how to hire better, and improve your training in best practices.
3. Hesitating to invest major resources to scale up your sales effort after all the conditions are in place. In a
low-growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development. In a high-
growth scenario, it’s a negative metric because it means you aren’t hiring fast enough.
As you assess your sales trajectory, gauge where your organization is in its development. There are three
main phases of a company’s development, and leadership demands are different at each stage:

1. The embryonic company. In this phase, seed capital is applied to assess the feasibility of an idea.
That’s followed by subsequent rounds of funding to build the initial product. The team in this phase
is usually a small, close-knit group that’s focused on building the first product. At this point, the CEO
job is a part-time position for someone who’s also the leader of a key function.
2. The formative company. In this stage, there’s enough product to begin testing the market. You can
finally connect with potential customers and see if you have a viable product. At this point, the
leadership challenge is bigger because you must make huge decisions about how to price, position,
sell, and promote your product.
3. The scaled-up company. Scale is about maximizing growth by building repeatable, efficient pro-
cesses and models of execution. In this phase, leaders must be proactive about adding essential

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Amp It Up Frank Slootman

resources. To be most effective, they must combine the scrappiness of a start-up leader with the
organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company.

Transform Your Strategy

It’s important to distinguish between the stages of evolution because the operational modes are so dif-
ferent. When evaluating a young company, growth matters more than profit margin or cost structure.
Growing is difficult when you’re a small start-up, but growing after you’ve reached scale can be even
harder. Growth tends to slow down when you’re starting to become well penetrated and saturated. A
higher probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths and adapt your original
offering for adjacent markets.

You must think well ahead of the current dynamic in your market, because if you wait until the need
for a strategic shift becomes overwhelmingly evident, you may be too late to address it. Anticipating
how markets and your position in them will evolve is essential. The sooner you lay the groundwork for
expanding into new markets, the easier all these challenges will be.

Amp Up Your Career

Just as you assess your organization, being more purposeful about your career can increase your for-
ward momentum. Follow these tips to help amp up your career:

• Have an endgame in mind to help you play a short and long game simultaneously. Evaluate each po-
tential new role based on what it can do for you in the long run.
• Don’t focus on title and pay. Instead of worrying about salary or job title, join a good company with a
mature management infrastructure to build a strong foundation to launch your career.
• Embrace the struggle. Try to embrace struggles rather than avoiding them because hardships are
incredibly formative and educational.
• Never fear a reference check. Think of everyone around you as a potential future reference. Small
kindnesses can be remembered for many years.

Just for CEOs—Dealing with Founders and Boards

If you’re a non-founder CEO joining an organization, tread lightly. Always speak and act with deference
toward the founders, because if the founders speak of you with admiration, you’ll gain a huge advan-
tage. In the long run, however, success trumps popularity. When you win, you’ll gain popularity with
everybody. If you get distracted because the founders don’t love you and the company suffers, you’ll
face dark days.

Like founders, members of your board of directors also require skillful relationship building and bound-
ary setting. New CEOs often hesitate to assert their purview because they aren’t sure where and how
the boundaries should be drawn. Remember that you’re there to win. The board will sing your praises if
the company hits all targets under your leadership, even if you disregard their suggestions. A good CEO
will lead the board, so never attend a board meeting unprepared. Prep carefully with your team, then go
into the meeting and lead the board to form a consensus along with you.

There are many paths to superior outcomes in business, and you’ll need to find one that suits your
temperament, disposition, and aptitudes. Apply your experiences to become a more effective version
of who you already are. If you persevere over long periods of time, focus intently on delivering value for
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Amp It Up Frank Slootman

customers, and build a disciplined culture for your employees, it will all pay off in the long run. You will
drive great outcomes for your organization, reap the rewards, and truly amp it up.

About the Author

Frank Slootman is the chairman and CEO at Snowflake Inc. With over 25 years of experience as an
entrepreneur and executive in the enterprise software industry, he also served as CEO and president
of ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017. Slootman holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics
from the Netherlands School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

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