Amp it Up

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The Power of Amping Up

keep playing your game but amp things up dramatically. 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.

The Five Key Steps of Amping It Up
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.

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.

Align Your People

Another source of misalignment is management by objectives (MBO), which I have eliminated at every company I've joined in the last 20 years. MBO causes employees to act as if they are running their own show. Because they get compensated on their personal metrics, it's next to impossible to pull them off projects. They will start negotiating with you for relief. That's not alignment, that's every man for himself. If you need MBO to get people to do their job, you may have the wrong people, the wrong managers, or both.

Sharpen Your Focus

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.

Leaders can do two things that bring almost instant benefit. 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? Get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing.

Most people have a relatively easy time coming up with their top three priorities. Just ask them.

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. That's concerning. But we avoid these pointed dialogs because it is easier to list five or ten priorities. The right ones may not even be buried in there somewhere. “Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

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?

Pick Up The Pace

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.

It's not a one‐time thing; it's not an email or a memo. It's using every encounter, meeting, and opportunity to increase the pace of whatever is going on. Apply pressure. Be impatient. Patience may be a virtue, but in business it can signal a lack of leadership. Nobody wants to swim in glue or struggle to get things done. Some organizations slow things down by design. Change that—ASAP.

Transform Your Strategy

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. That's as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.

Being on a mission is a visceral experience, not merely an intellectual one. When your organization has a well‐defined purpose, you feel it down to your bones. You feel energized when you start the workday, and you feel good about whatever progress you've made toward the mission when you shut down for the night.

Being on a mission unlocks the X factor: an intangible that can drastically elevate performance as people set out to achieve greatness—together. It makes your working life not just more productive but also more fun.

Conversely, you're not on a mission if you feel like you spend most of your days checking off trivial to‐do items, passing the buck to other people, reading and forwarding email, and covering your ass so you won't get in any trouble. Showing up every day at a “good enough is good enough” company is the opposite of fun and energizing. Just trying to get through each day is a depressing way to spend a career.

The War Against Your Competitors

It's no exaggeration to say that business is war. Either you already have a turf, and you have to defend it against all comers, or else you have to invade somebody else's turf and take it. We are playing defense and offense at the same time. Either way, conflict is inevitable. Only the government can print money; the rest of us have to take it from somebody else.

This is a cold line but I love it

You'll have to teach them that the game doesn't really start until the other guys, whose profits you are trying to seize, start fighting back with everything they have. They are not our friendly competitors. At a minimum, noses will get bloodied. At worst, in a few months or years, some firms in our industry will still be in business and others won't.

Not everyone has this visceral sense of contest, especially at companies that shield their people from the real stakes at hand. When leaders fail to explain the industry landscape, employees don't feel the cold winds of competition. Their jobs and paychecks feel secure, but that's an illusion. Good leaders explain that none of us are ever truly safe in our roles for any length of time. If this fact makes people uncomfortable, that's good. You need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because the only alternative is denialism.

So true, it's required to have that mindset

“What's the real cost of something free that doesn't do the job properly? How would you like a free elephant, if you have to feed, house, and clean up after it?”

I have to use this somehow this is cold

In sales meetings I would sometimes pose a clarifying question: “What is our definition of victory? Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, had a simple answer: ‘Breaking the enemy's will to fight.’ ” That translates in business terms to persuading some of your competition's best talent to join your company instead. The more high‐achieving people who desert their current employers to join us, the more we are winning. It's a double whammy: not only is our enemy losing some of its best talent, but we've taken their strength. A talent drain is the best evidence that a company is in serious trouble and is losing its will to fight.

Cold!!

The War Against Incrementalism

Another human tendency is to approach things incrementally, from an abundance of caution. It feels safer to inch forward rather than take bold leaps. Incrementalism is about avoiding risk by building on whatever has already been achieved as a stable foundation. But merely trying for marginal improvements on the status quo carries its own risks.

Very important and this is the risk of saying yes slowly. It's damaging!

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.

Rather than seeking incremental progress from the current state, try thinking about the future state you want to reach and 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. Don't try to steer the ship by looking at its wake!

This is what I was fucking looking for. What do I do next? Well work backward from the future state that is desired. This works for many things

Why did eBay not become Amazon? Why did IBM not become Microsoft? Why didn't taxi companies invent Uber? Why didn't Hilton or Marriott invent Airbnb? Why didn't Oracle invent Snowflake? Why didn't BMC invent ServiceNow? Why didn't tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn't Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.

Incrementalism is the enemy

Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential. So what if you don't get there? At least you went for it! Don't settle for respectable mediocrity; seek to exploit every ounce of potential you are entrusted with. If you want to win big, imagine a radically different future that is not tethered to the past. This is why innovation always seems to come from the least expected places. They don't have a past to care about. They have nothing to lose, no ships to burn behind them.

This is the same idea that Chip Wilson has when he talks about having Amnesia

Put Execution Ahead of Strategy

Put Analysis Before Solutions

We tend to be “solution centric”—we spend most of our time discussing solutions rather than diagnosing problems.

Part of the problem is usually intellectual laziness. Your own frame of reference may lead you to a highly selective subset of the range of possible explanations. We're naturally drawn to certain narratives, and we resist others.

We always think we know the problem and quickly jump to solution giving. Focus on the analysis

Another cause of jumping to solutions is groupthink, which discourages new, creative, unexpected ways of thinking.

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.

So it behooves us to act more like doctors: slow down and critically examine situations and problems before settling on an explanation, never mind a solution. This requires intellectual honesty—the ability to stay rational and set aside our biases and past experiences. Consider the full range of possibilities, not just the first one that jumps out at you. Seek counsel outside of your direct environment.

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. The more you have seen, the harder this tactic gets, but it's worth the effort.

Just like everybody who uses the term first principles, they never explain how to actually use first principles so it's utterly useless advice to most people

Align Incentives for Customer Success

Grow Fast or Die Slow

“Grow Fast or Die Slow” is the title of a 2014 study by McKinsey & Co that examined thousands of software and services companies between 1980 and 2012. It concluded that growth trumps everything else as a driver and predictor of long‐term success. “Super grower” companies,

too few leaders truly grasp the importance of growth. They have the misguided belief that their mission is to reach profitability as quickly as possible, and that growth can follow profitability. But that shows a misunderstanding of how value is created and investors think. Once a start‐up begins showing profits, investors conclude that either it doesn't know how to invest in further growth or that it has run out of growth opportunities. They'll wonder why you aren't plowing those premature profits back into the business. They won't expect profitability yet; investors know that growth is a ferocious consumer of resources. That's what their money is for.

Growth is everything. How can cSDR help with growth at Confluent?

Slow‐growing companies become the walking dead. Most would be better off failing catastrophically and quickly. At least with a quick demise, everybody can stop throwing good money after bad and move on to redeploy their human and financial resources to more promising ventures.

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.

I often ask other CEOs to explain their growth model—in other words, how fast could their company grow if it optimally executed? What constraints would limit or enable their growth?

This is a good question to think about as any leader

It's often impossible to assess the true limits of growth. It's not just plugging numbers into a formula; it requires human judgment and insights. That's why we have to keep leaning into it.

The limits of growth exist in the social reality which means it's an excellent opportunity for distortion

When in doubt, push the model to set a more ambitious target.

Fast growth separates great companies from their competition. You can psychologically leave everyone else in the dust when you outstrip their growth rates by a considerable margin. It's intimidating and demoralizing to your rivals.

Oh this motherfucker has domination on his mind!

Strategic Lessons From Data Domain
Attack your competition's weakness not their strength
Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else's
It's much easier to attack an existing market than to create a new one
Early Adopters buy differently than later adopters
You have to make an irrefutable case that your new solution is both safe and cost‐effective. That's when the broader market will become accessible to your pitch.
Stay close to home in the early going - Sell locally
Build the whole product or solve the whole problem as fast as you can.
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. Deliver a complete solution so you won't be vulnerable to displacement
Bet on the correct enabling technologies.
Architecture is everything
This one can get very techy, but we've seen it play out over and over at our companies. Think hard about the ideal architecture for your product before you launch.
Prepare to transform your strategy sooner than you expect
Just winning your market is not enough. How will you sustain your trajectory once you do? What will be your next act? How will you expand your addressable market? Will you even recognize the need to shift your strategy before you hit the proverbial wall?

You are a Product

Are you happy with your upward progress in your career? Could you go faster? Probably.

As professional people, we are products. So try to product‐manage yourself. Develop your product through education, training, and experience. Your resume is your shingle. Buff and polish it. Make sure it carries some punch.

In this marketplace, the question isn't whether you're qualified; it's whether you're better qualified than other candidates.

People literally never asked me in interviews what I thought I was good at. But that's always one of the first and most interesting questions I ask from the other side of the desk.

What do you think you're good at that most people also aren't? What do you think you're bad at that most people aren't? What do you think you're bad at that most people are also bad at?

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