Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

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

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.

Celebrate people who own their responsibilities, take and defend clear positions, argue for their preferred strategies, and seek to move the dial.

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.

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.

The world eventually catches on to those who mostly manage appearances instead of adding value to the organization.

Start a running list of useful anecdotes, and keep adding new ones so your material doesn't get stale. You can also safely inject humor into your stories. And whatever you do, never read text bullets verbatim from a PowerPoint slide—that's the fastest way to lose everyone's attention.

anxiety about growth is a bigger problem than ignorance about growth.

do not add headcount to regions where things clearly are not figured out. That's hoping and praying, not sales management.

You can't brute‐force a sales effort if the underlying conditions aren't in place yet.

Trying to staff a whole sales team prematurely is a very common managerial mistake. So is failing to figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers

declaring my own mistakes, I signaled to everyone that it was safe to admit their mistakes too, without fearing extreme consequences. No one gets everything right all the time. The faster we all face our demons and correct ourselves, the better off the business will be.

If you can't find the backbone to make necessary changes, you are holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential.

you need to change things fast, which can only happen by switching out the people whose skills no longer fit the mission

If you offer a partial solution that requires your customers to seek the rest of the solution elsewhere, you are making it easy for a competitor to drive through the gap you left open.

Data Domain, we didn't hire our first full‐time salesperson until well into my tenure as CEO. First, we had to establish a good product‐market fit before we could attempt to cross the proverbial chasm between early adopters and the mass market—a 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.

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 first—especially when someone's future career is at stake.

High‐growth 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 wasn’t their cup of tea. Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose. It’s unlikely that a strong, effective, and mission‐aligned culture will please everybody.

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.

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

Another lesson from these examples: attacking markets that have weak, unpopular incumbents is infinitely easier than chasing strong, popular occupants. Customers do not easily part with products that do the job for them. They have enough on their plate already. You need massive, not marginal differentiation, or they will simply filter you out as noise.

But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won't lose, but you won't win either. Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That's why very few enterprises that were in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend

The legal system will always be exploited by those who cannot compete on merit. The legality of a business tactic doesn't matter; it's all about what people can get away with.

The mission also has to be treated with urgency. There is a saying in sales that “time kills all deals.” Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants. The faster we separate from the competition, the more likely we are to succeed. Urgency is a mindset that can be learned if it doesn't come to you naturally. You can embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it.

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?

Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing. Most

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.

good judgment comes from bad judgment.” Experience may be overrated by some, but it's hard to find a substitute for it.

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.