Amp It Up

Amp It Up

by Frank Slootman
Released January 2022
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781119836117

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Book description

The secret to leading growth is your mindset

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.

Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model—and they don’t need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day.

Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them.

Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Praise for Amp It Up
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. PART I: Amping Up
    1. 1 Introduction: The Power of Amping Up
      1. Amp It Up
      2. Raise Your Standards
      3. Align Your People and Culture
      4. Sharpen Your Focus
      5. Pick Up the Pace
      6. Transform Your Strategy
      7. The Epic Battle
    2. 2 My Journey from Teenage Toilet Cleaner to Serial CEO
      1. A Childhood Grounded in Discipline
      2. Landing in the USA
      3. Burroughs Corporation and Comshare
      4. Compuware
      5. Borland
      6. Data Domain
      7. Transitions: EMC and Greylock
      8. ServiceNow
      9. A Very Brief Retirement
      10. Snowflake
      11. Becoming an Amped‐Up Leader
  7. PART II: Raise Your Standards
    1. 3 Make Your Organization Mission Driven
      1. What Does It Mean to Be Mission Driven?
      2. A Great Mission Is Big (but Not Impossible!)
      3. A Great Mission Is Clear
      4. A Great Mission Is Not About Money
      5. How to Nurture the Mission
      6. Living the Mission Every Day
    2. 4 Declare War on Your Competitors and on Incrementalism
      1. The War Against Your Competitors
      2. The War Against Incrementalism
      3. Tying These Battles Together: Using Audacious Goals to Outpace Your Competition
      4. Lead Your People into These Battles
    3. 5 Put Execution Ahead of Strategy
      1. Great Execution Is Rarer than Great Strategy
      2. Treat Execution like a Teachable Competency
      3. Getting Strategy Right
      4. Strategy Problems versus Execution Problems
      5. You Don't Need to Hire Consultants or Strategists
  8. PART III: Align Your People and Culture
    1. 6 Hire Drivers, Not Passengers, and Get the Wrong People off the Bus
      1. Drivers Wanted
      2. Making the Distinction
      3. Getting the Wrong People off the Bus
      4. Pulling the Trigger
      5. Finding the Right People
      6. Maintain an Active Recruiting Posture
    2. 7 Build a Strong Culture
      1. Culture Matters More than You Think
      2. Establishing Cultural Values at Data Domain
      3. Culture at ServiceNow
      4. Turning Around the Culture at Snowflake
      5. Your Responsibility to Protect Your Culture
    3. 8 Teach Everyone to Go Direct and Build Mutual Trust
      1. The Dangers of Silos
      2. A Better Option: Going Direct
      3. Building Trust
      4. Are You a Trustworthy Leader?
      5. The Benefits of a High‐Trust Environment
  9. PART IV: Sharpen Your Focus
    1. 9 Put Analysis Before Solutions
      1. The Problem of Racing to Solutions
      2. How to Focus on Analysis
      3. Analysis Is Especially Important for People Decisions
    2. 10 Align Incentives for Customer Success
      1. Do You Need a Customer Success Department?
      2. Customer Success Is Everyone's Business
  10. PART V: Pick Up the Pace
    1. 11 Ramp Up Sales
      1. Sales Growth Is About Timing
      2. Data Domain: Don't Rush Sales Before You Cross the Chasm
      3. Snowflake: Making Sense of Your Gunslingers and Flatliners
      4. ServiceNow: Seizing the Right Moment to Ramp Up
      5. Conclusion
    2. 12 Grow Fast or Die Slow
      1. Why Focus on Growth?
      2. Two Problems: Uncertainty and Fear
      3. Build a Growth Model That Stretches Your Goals
      4. Leave the Competition Behind
      5. Continuing to Grow After You're Already Big
      6. Bringing Down the Costs of Growth
    3. 13 Stay Scrappy as You Scale Up
      1. The Paradox of Scaling Up
      2. The Embryonic Company
      3. The Formative Company
      4. The Scaled‐Up Company
      5. Hang On to Your Early‐Stage Dynamism
  11. PART VI: Transform Your Strategy
    1. 14 Materialize Your Opportunities—the Data Domain Growth Story
      1. Strategic Lessons from Data Domain
      2. Takeaway 1: Attack weakness, not strength.
      3. Takeaway 2: Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else's.
      4. Takeaway 3: It's much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one.
      5. Takeaway 4: Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.
      6. Takeaway 5: Stay close to home in the early going.
      7. Takeaway 6: Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
      8. Takeaway 7: Bet on the correct enabling technologies.
      9. Takeaway 8: Architecture is everything.
      10. Takeaway 9: Prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect.
      11. The End of the Data Domain Story
    2. 15 Open the Aperture—the ServiceNow Expansion Story
      1. My Introduction to ServiceNow
      2. How to Spot a Potential Super‐Grower
      3. Improving Execution of the Original Strategy
      4. Expanding Our Opportunities
      5. Going Public and Going beyond IT
      6. Surviving the Competition
    3. 16 Swing for the Fences—the Snowflake Growth Story
      1. Plan the Next Shift Before You Think You Need To
      2. “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud”
      3. Enter the Data Cloud
      4. Going Even Broader: Data Marketplaces and Programmability
      5. Playing Your Strategic Cards
  12. PART VII: The Amped‐Up Leader
    1. 17 Amp Up Your Career
      1. You Are a Product
      2. Education Matters Some …
      3. … But Experience Matters More
      4. Aptitude Matters Most
      5. Personality Tips the Scales
      6. Develop Your Communication Skills
      7. Hold On to Your Long‐Term Goals
      8. Do Not Unduly Focus on Title and Pay
      9. Embrace the Struggle
      10. Make Sure You Never Fear a Reference Check
      11. Career Doldrums and Career Killers
    2. 18 Just for CEOs—Dealing with Founders and Boards
      1. The Challenge of Succeeding a Founder
      2. Tread Lightly as You Make Changes
      3. In the Long Run, Success Trumps Popularity
      4. The Delicate Art of Board Dynamics
      5. What Not to Do: Subservience
      6. What to Do Instead: Lead Your Board
    3. 19 Conclusion—Great Leaders Have Great Outcomes
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Index
  15. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Amp It Up
  • Author(s): Frank Slootman
  • Release date: January 2022
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119836117