Amp It Up (Frank Slootman)

Books · Business, Startups

Summary

Leading for hyper growth by raising expectations, increasing urgency, and elevating intensity

Most organisations have ample room to make improvements without making fundamental changes

5 steps:

1. Raise your standards: Steve Jobs approach - anything that’s not insanely great is rejected. Fight the impulse to accept things with lower standards just so somebody can chalk a “win”. Insanely great is much more energising
2. Align your people: management by objectives is horrible for this. Causes every person to look out for their own KPIs
3. Sharpen your focus: think about execution more sequentially than parallely. Work on fewer things at the same time. Prioritise hard. Even if you aren’t sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway. The process alone will be enlightening. Figure out what matters most, what matters less, and what does not matter at all. Priorities are ideally a single word. If you have many priorities, you have none
4. Pick up the pace:
5. Transform your strategy

If there is doubt, there is no doubt (that this person is the wrong hire)

Be quick to figure out what to keep, what to jettison, and what to amp up

Time kills all deals. Time is not our friend. It introduces risks like new entrants

Worrying about strategy before your team is great at executing is pointless. Execution is hard, and great execution is scarce. This makes it a great source of competitive advantage