Amp it up - Summary and Checklists

Definitely one of the strongest books about leadership

1. Raise your standard

Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, ask them instead what they think:

• Ask “Are you thrilled with it? Do you absolutely love it?” Most of the time I would hear, “It's okay,” or “It's not bad.” Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.

Be thrilled with what you’re doing. Channel inner Steve Jobs. Aim for insanely great!

Mission checklist

• big and ambitious
• crystal clear, The more defined and intense the mission, the easier it will be for everyone to focus on it.
• not about money, instead with true purpose
• A great mission helps prevent distractions that dilute everyone's focus.
• Continually narrowing the mission aperture is key because companies have a natural tendency to lose focus over time.
• If you turn your time and attention to the latest shiny object, regardless of how little it has to do with your mission, you are on the path to trouble. Distractions will inevitably pop up every day and need to be fought relentlessly.

Declare war on your competitors

Hard truth, business is war, competition is fierce, Winning is very hard. Explain the industry landscape that employees feel the cold wind of competition and feel uncomfortable, that’s good. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. They are not our friendly competitors.

"None of us are ever truly safe in our roles for any length of time.”

The war against incrementalism

Incrementalism = lack of audacity and boldness = killing yourself gradually through stagnation

• Think about the future state you want to reach (Product Vision and KPIs) 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.
• Double 2x, 10x in certain time

Put execution ahead of Strategy

“No strategy is better than its execution.”

• 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.

Teach your people to drive the business to its limits:

• Mesmerizing results, often multiple magnitudes faster, better,
• Strive for radically different results
• Anticipate what it should look like in 12-24 months
• Understand the competitive landscape

Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences.

::Unplanned, incremental growth leads to mediocrity and waste::

2. Align your people and culture

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

• Sort out the valuable people from the deadweight
• Act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus to change the overall trajectory.
• Create a vetted, prioritized list of possible candidates for each critical role you are responsible for and check periodically.
• Do not rely on acute sourcing tactics such as recruiters and LinkedIn. You will only see the active job seekers, who are unlikely to be the candidates you really want.
• Staff ahead of need. Recruiting never stops.
• Get good at both hiring and firing to be on your way to great results and a thriving career

Build a Strong Culture

High-growth enterprises are not easy places to live. The pressure is relentless. Performance is aggressively managed. The pattern in places with a weak culture: lots of fiefdoms that spend their days fighting each other more than they fight the competition.

R-E-C-I-P-E:

• R = Respect
• E = Excellence
• C = Customer
• I = Integrity
• P = Performance
• E = Execution
• Urge people to feel empowered to act forcefully on behalf of customers. Not just the big, strategic customers but all of them. No exceptions.
• Build trust, trust is the first victim of integrity violations, which set off a chain reaction of negative consequences.
• Pursue former employees — who had nothing to lose — to shed some light on what they had experienced.
• Actively pursue and enforce compliance to the culture.
• Culture check
  • 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 they consistently pursue high standards in projects, products, talent, everything?
  • Do most people execute with urgency and pep in their step?

Teach Everyone to Go Direct and Build Mutual Trust

People get good at managing up and down the org chart of a single silo but flounder when problems require cooperation across silos.

High-trust workplace cultures tend to correlate with high-performance organizations.

• Tell people to go direct: If you have a problem that cuts across departments, figure out who in those other departments can most directly help you address the issue, and reach out without hesitation.
• Trust goes up when people see that we are self-aware about our own shortcomings and areas for improvement.
• Under-promise and overdeliver to truly inspire trust.
• Publicly admit and declare a fast failure if you realize that one of my decisions had been incorrect and regrettable, to set a good example

3. Sharpen your focus

9 Put Analysis Before Solutions

• I am generally not a fan of just trying things, throwing ideas against the wall to see if they stick. We lose time and waste resources that way. Let’s try a rifle shot instead of a scatter gun.
• My preferred tactic is to start with so-called first principles. Break problems down into their most basic elements. Ignore what you think you already know, and imagine you are facing this kind of situation for the first time in your life.
• In meetings, I often object to presentations where 90% of the content is about the solution, not the problem.
• Several times a year we conduct what we call “calibration” sessions where each department head presents to their peers, profiling the performance and potential of their direct reports.

10 Align Incentives for Customer Success

• If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services. The alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforce that customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department. This means that when a problem arises, every department has a responsibility to fix it. Everyone’s incentives should be fully aligned with what’s good for our customers.
• Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.
• At all three companies, we made our technical support people the organizational owners of customer issues from end to end. We also moved technical support organizationally under the umbrella of engineering,
• It is important that salespeople do not delegate part of their role to customer success types.

4. Pick up the pace

Ramp Up Sales

• How do you know when to ramp up a start-up’s sales?
• Are you happy with your current sales productivity metrics?
• Are you happy with the metrics of your lead generation pipeline?
• Are you being realistic in your timeline of sales targets?
• Are you being aggressive enough and thinking big enough to outpace your competition?
• Is your sales team buying into your targets and timeline? Are they owning the goals and fully committed to hitting them?
• Figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers before ramping up headcount.
• Selling in initial stages is more akin to business development than a defined, repeatable sales process.
• One big challenge of early-stage selling is insufficient demand, so we decided that we had to give our new reps a ton of leads they could follow up on, right away.
• High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.
• Lead generation wasn’t that expensive compared to the much bigger commitment of hiring and retaining direct sales staff.
• If you can sell a product to companies in New York but not in Atlanta, the problem isn’t your product.
• It’s quite common in early-stage companies for a small group of reps to be driving most of the revenue, while a larger group of flatliners are failing to contribute. The problem in these cases is usually a bad habit of hiring indiscriminately, and a lack of standardized, effective sales enablement.
• Part of the problem was that Snowflake’s recruiting had been mostly outsourced, a mistake for any sales organization in my view. If there is one skill a sales manager must have, it is recruiting. It has to be done in-house because recruiting is so core to successful sales management.
• In a static, low growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development. But in high-growth scenarios it’s a negative metric because it means you aren’t hiring fast enough.
• Never simply throw them into stone-cold territories without a viable plan or support.

12 Grow Fast or Die Slow

• Relatively few make growth as big a priority as it should be.
• For a business to break out and reach escape velocity, it needs a ton of differentiation. It needs to profoundly upset and disrupt the status quo. People yawn when offered merely marginal change.
• Goals are powerful: they change behavior.
• 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 possible, always own your distribution rather than delegate it to a third party. Nobody cares about selling your product more than you.
• Many companies try to continue that momentum by investing heavily in a second major product or service — a sequel to whatever made them successful originally. But most have a hard time being serial innovators. A higher-probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets.
• I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have strong financial oversight and discipline on sales compensation. You may be tempted at some point to make your comp plans more generous to recruit and retain top sales talent, but abandoning financial rigor can be a fatal mistake — not just during the planning stages of each year but every day, literally from one sales deal to the next.

13 Stay Scrappy as You Scale Up

• There is no point in hiring ten salespeople when you don’t yet know how to make even one salesperson productive.
• You’ll know when it’s time to ramp up when customers are virtually ripping the product from your hands.
• I had no idea how much value a topflight finance chief could add!
• The most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start-up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale down as required.
• Your mission as a leader is to figure out how to hang on to your early-stage dynamism and avoid the lethargy of mass and bulk. One technique I use is to challenge key people with this question: “If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?”
• Similarly, I ask our teams what’s the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason?

5. Transform your strategy

Materialize your opportunities

• Attack weakness, not strength.
• Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else’s.
• It’s much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one.
• Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.
• Stay close to home in the early going.
• Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
• Bet on the correct enabling technologies.
• Architecture is everything.
• Prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect.

Open your aperture

Ultimately the real question isn’t how broadly you can expand — it’s whether you can hang on to the new markets that you expand into.

Swing for the Fences

• 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 absolutely essential.
• The sooner you lay the groundwork for expanding into new markets, the easier all these challenges will be.

Leadership Checklist

• Energetic, engaging personality goes a long way in the workplace
• New a low maintenance, low drama personality
• Style as conversational mode, just chatting and telling stories to a couple of people in my office, rather than in front of hundreds. I start with the messages I want to convey and then fold in stories to illustrate my assertions.
• Whatever you do, never read text bullets verbatim from a PowerPoint slide — that’s the fastest way to lose everyone’s attention.
• Make Sure You Never Fear a Reference Check: Think of everyone around you — bosses, peers, and subordinates — as a potential future reference.
• Most people are, by definition, average performers. It’s ultimately about your attitude and behavior, which is a choice, not a skill set.
• If you don’t collaborate well, if you don’t take ownership for your project, it won’t be long before you’re seen as more trouble than you are worth.
• Your mission is to win, not to achieve popularity. When you win, paradoxically, you will gain popularity with everybody. But if you get distracted because the founders don’t love you, and the company suffers, you will face dark days indeed.
• The board will sing your praises to the skies if the company hits all its targets under your leadership, even if you disregard their suggestions.
• A good C-Level will lead a board.
• Preparation is your key advantage.
• The CEO should make the case for appropriate compensation for each senior exec.