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Chapter 1

Amp It Up

Book by Frank Slootman

  • Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people.

  • 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

  • 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.

5 Key steps:

  • Raise your standards
  • Align your people
  • Sharpen your focus
  • Pick up the pace
  • Transform your strategy

Raise your Standards​

  • Try applying “insanely great” as a standard on a daily basis and see how far you get.
  • 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. Aim for insanely great.

Align Your People and Culture​

  • Are we all pulling on the same oar?
  • Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO)
    • MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show.
    • That's not alignment, that's every man for himself.

Sharpen your focus​

  • Things tend to get added to the pile over time, and before we know it, we have huge backlogs.

Fix:

  1. Think about execution more sequentially than in parallel.
  2. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard.

Questions:

  1. If you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, and nothing else, what would it be and why?
  2. What are we not going to do?
  3. What are the consequences of not doing something?

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

  • Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing

  • 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.

Pick Up the Pace​

  • Leaders set the pace.
  • Good performers crave a culture of energy.
  • Apply pressure. Be impatient.
  • Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership.
    • Some organizations slow things down by design. Change that—ASAP.

Transform your strategy​

  • Transforming your strategy will require you to “widen the aperture” of your thinking about the business model, to reach new and bigger markets.
  • While everybody else has their head down, you need to have your head up, to confront both the need and the opportunity for strategic transformation.
  • Develop a healthy sense of paranoia about your business model because your competitors are surely trying to disrupt you.

The Epic Battle

  • Leadership is a lonely business. You live 24/7 with uncertainty, anxiety, and the fear of personal failure. You make countless decisions, and being wrong about any of them might let down your employees and investors.
  • The stakes, both financial and human, are high. And what adds to the terror is that there is no manual, no how‐to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early‐stage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war.