Top highlights from Amp It Up
Do an unsentimental evaluation of what resources and staff you have versus how much you really need. There is usually more performance and efficiency to be gained from your existing staff, before you take the path of least resistanceunplanned, incremental growth, leading to mediocrity and waste. One of your biggest responsibilities is to stop that incremental attitude in its tracks.
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You will have numerous jobs, titles, and pay grades over your career, not just between companies but within companies. At each step, be thoughtful and purposeful rather than opportunistic. Sometimes it might be best to take a step backward in title or pay to set up a better path forward. Your peer group will try to influence your career decisions, but be your own person. Steer your own ship. Never put your personal decisions to a vote.
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If you don't know how to execute, every strategy will fail, even the most promising ones. As one of my former bosses observed: No strategy is better than its execution.
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What does that mean? For starters, never go into a board meeting, tee up a topic, and ask them what they think. Instead, prep carefully with your team in advance, and then go in and tell them what you think. If they then respond with questions or concerns, that's fine. You have started the meeting by filling a vacuum, instead of creating one. That will make it much harder for them to dominate the discussion.
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Hiring decisions are naturally fraught with bias because so many human qualities are impossible to measure objectively. It's forgivable that some hiring decisions end up as failures, but what's not forgivable is refusing to recognize, acknowledge, and take action on hiring mistakes. Even after decades of experience, I have repeatedly hired executives who were successful in their past roles, well respected, well likedand nevertheless turned out to be terrible hires. It happens to all of us!
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Whenever there are glaring discrepancies in evaluating one of our executives, we double down on analysis rather than jumping to conclusions. There must be a reason why people are having very different experiences with this person. With enough time devoted to discussion, we always get to the bottom of it. Analysis firstespecially when someone's future career is at stake.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Data Domain, we didn't hire our first fulltime salesperson until well into my tenure as CEO. First, we had to establish a good productmarket fit before we could attempt to cross the proverbial chasm between early adopters and the mass marketa concept first described in Geoff Moore's book Crossing the Chasm. We weren't ready yet to establish a systemic, repeatable sales process that would yield consistent results.
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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.
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Selling in these initial stages is more akin to business development than a defined, repeatable sales process. In a business development situation, every aspect is interpreted case by case, and we adapt to the circumstances at hand. Pricing and contract terms are flexible. Selling, by contrast, is a systemic, highly standardized process.
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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.
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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?
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Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing. Most
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good judgment comes from bad judgment. Experience may be overrated by some, but it's hard to find a substitute for it.
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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.
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Priority should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.
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Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a neverending 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?
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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.
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A higherprobability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets. Don't venture too far afield if you don't need to, though. You can expand your capacity to sell while at the same time increasing your addressable marketwithout trying to strike gold a second time. That's how we continued to grow ServiceNow, which was already a super grower when I joined but still had plenty of room to expand its core offering.
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There are many different paths to superior outcomes in business. You will have to find your own path, one that suits your temperament, disposition, and natural aptitudes. Therefore, don't try to copy or emulate other leadersincluding me. Don't ask yourself in tough situations, What would Frank do? That will only slow down the process of finding your own path. Instead, make the most of your unique aggregate of experiences. Apply those experiences, and the insights we've discussed in previous chapters, to become a truer, more honed, more effective version of who you already are. Finding your own path, however long it takes, will unlock your personal power.
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Several short tenures in a row also imply that you had poor judgment in choosing those roles or perhaps that you're the kind of person who gets into chronic conflicts with management. One brief tenure will be seen as a fluke by future employers, but a series of them will be seen as a red flag. The shortest tenure I ever had was three years; all of my others were in the fivetosevenyear range.
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Experience can be a proxy for aptitude but not a perfect one. People that have been with successful companies are often swept along in the vortex of the company's momentum. The aura of a great company can rub off on its employees, to the point that it can be hard to separate the company's success from the employee's. We've mistakenly hired some passengers this way, thinking they were drivers.
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Conversely, I'm always intrigued by candidates who once crashed and burned with a company and learned something from facing those serious challenges. Humans always learn more from our struggles and failures than from our easy successes. Your experience will only be valuable to prospective employers if it taught you useful lessons that you can take into your next role. Speak credibly and insightfully, in detail, about your experiences, no matter how disappointing they were.
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Whenever talent is in short supply, as it almost always is in Silicon Valley, betting on aptitude is a great recruiting strategy for employers, albeit a less certain one. You can hire people ahead of their own development curve and inspire them to grow into challenging new roles.
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big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities. We valued traits such as strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, and a no excuses mentality. People who get things done rather than explain why they can't. This personality type lines up with our obsession with hiring drivers rather than passengers, as we saw in an earlier chapter.
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I've been in companies that thought employees should be number one because they reasoned that welltreated employees would therefore treat customers the best. Why be indirect about it? We don't have any reason to exist without our customers.
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At Data Domain, we saw many of our competitors secondguessing their strategy and tweaking their plans for no good reason. We left them behind at least in part because we didn't do that. We kept our heads down, trusted our strategy, and focused on getting better and better at executing it.
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Even those who have never interacted with X will hear through the grapevine that X is abusive, unscrupulous, dishonest, or whatever the problem might be. If such behavior goes unaddressedor even worse, if it is rewarded with a promotion for delivering strong business resultspeople across the company will conclude that the values and the inspirational posters are bullshit. Everyone will know that the real, unspoken culture is Do whatever you want, as long as you make your numbers.
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Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences. If you want a strong culture, you will have to make hard decisions to let certain people go for the greater good. There's no way to avoid those cases.
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Not surprisingly, his answer was his sales team. The answer I was hoping for, however, was his leadership peer group, meaning his counterparts in engineering, marketing, finance, services, and so on, because that's the team that really runs any company. The sales team by itself is a just one silo within the bigger organization.
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Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos.
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Personally, I considered it a failure on my part if executives had to come to me to adjudicate.
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But if you as the leader keep stressing the importance of going direct, you can break everyone's habit of staying within silos. After a while, people will engage laterally just as easily as they do inside their own teams.
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Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences. It's also vitally importantyet very difficultto maintain your intellectual honesty. Can you see things as they really are and fully appreciate what is happening? Human nature has a strong tendency to rationalize situations, to convince us that no significant changes are necessary. Reality can rattle us, making us nervous and uncomfortable. To cope with the stress, we talk ourselves into a less damning interpretation. This is why groupthink and confirmation bias are common and incredibly dangerous to the wellbeing of the enterprise. It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.
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You may be horribly wrong and need to bail on it. As Scott McNealy famously said, fail fastthe sooner the better. We sometimes use the expression that dog won't huntnot in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn't working, no matter what we do. It's hard to say that if you're irrationally attached to a strategy.
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In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.
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Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch.
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That's why, in an amped up company, execution is king.
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Hire Drivers, Not Passengers, and Get the Wrong People off the Bus Drivers Wanted
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Passengers are people who don't mind simply being carried along by the company's momentum, offering little or no input, seemingly not caring much about the direction chosen by management. They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers. They are often accepted into the fabric of the organization and stay there for many years. The problem is that while passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem quite well, they have no investment in solving it. They don't do the heavy lifting. They avoid taking strong positions at the risk of being wrong about something. They can take any side of an issue, depending on how the prevailing winds are blowing. In large organizations especially, there are many places to hide without really being noticed.
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Drivers, on the other hand, get their satisfaction from making things happen, not blending in with the furniture. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from both themselves and others. They exude energy, urgency, ambition, even boldness. Faced with a challenge, they usually say, Why not rather than That's impossible.
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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 howto guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, earlystage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war.
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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. Look for hunger, attitude, innate abilities. Perhaps look for the same career-frustrated person I had been all these years.
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These qualities make drivers massively valuable. Finding, recruiting, rewarding, and retaining them should be among your top priorities. Recognize them privately and publicly, promote them, and elevate them as example of what others should aspire to. That will start waking up those who are merely along for the ride. Celebrate people who own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and seek to move the dial.
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This line of inquiry has other benefits. Employees should be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel strongly that they matter to the organization, that they contribute in significant ways, that their absence would significantly hurt its results. If they can say those things honestly, they will feel far more secure and confident in their own value. It will also advance their careers at any company that recognizes and rewards
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such situations, at any level of a company, the first order of business is sorting out the valuable people from the deadweight (including but not exclusively those with a passenger attitude). Then you have to do what Jim Collins described in Good to Great as moving the wrong people off the bus and putting the right ones on the bus, in the right seats. In that order.
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The other advantage of moving fast is that everyone who stays on the bus will know that you're dead serious about high standards. The good ones will be energized by those standards. If others start looking for greener, lessdemanding pastures because they don't want to meet those standards, that's fine too. I know this philosophy may come across as harsh. But what's even harsher is not doing the job you were hired to do as a leader. If
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One of the more irritating habits VCs have is "pattern matching," making recommendations and suggestions based on what other supposedly successful companies were doing. No two companies are alike, and just because another company is doing it, doesn't make it right.
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Highgrowth enterprises are not easy places to live. The pressure is relentless. Performance is aggressively managed. There is no let up. I have seen employees depart after a short time because the intensity and pace just wasnt their cup of tea. Culture is not about making people feel good per se, its about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose. Its unlikely that a strong, effective, and missionaligned culture will please everybody.
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We coped in ways I have used ever since: 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 cannotfail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us.
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Perhaps, look for the same careerfrustrated person I had been all these years. It was quite satisfying to turn this into a highpowered strategy to drive business. I ended up with better, cheaper, more loyal, more motivated talent than we would have with a conventional hiring mentality. It does come with risk, but there is always risk in hiring. I have misfired with great resumes plenty of times.
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As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.
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Now let's look at the three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.
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The downside of any established market is the friction created when new ways of doing things challenge the comforting traditions that may stretch back for decades. Older, more conservative professionals in any field may fear that an upstart technology will threaten their job security and livelihoods. But more forwardlooking (and often younger) professionals get excited by breakthrough innovation and can't wait to try it out. That's what drives the distinction between early adopters and late adopters, explained so brilliantly in Geoffrey Moore's landmark book, Crossing the Chasm. If you try to sell to both groups the same way, you are very likely to fail.
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As one of my former bosses observed: No strategy is better than its execution.
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The key strategy is to aim for early adopters first because they (and their companies) are more comfortable with taking a risk on an exciting but still unproven technology. They are also astute evaluators of new technology, eager to change things for the better and then show off to their peers how cuttingedge they are.
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Late adoptersa much bigger area under the bell curveare motivated by minimizing risk as well as costs. They have no interest in being the first kid on the block with some cool new technology. The definition of crossing the chasm is building a beachhead of satisfied early adopters, who can then be used as examples to reassure late adopters. You have to make an irrefutable case that your new solution is both safe and costeffective. That's when the broader market will become accessible to your pitch.
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