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

Five Key Steps in the Amp It Up process:

Raise your standards

Align your people

Sharpen your focus

Pick up the pace

Transform your strategy

I am not so much focused day-to-day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation. Doing everything we can to the best of our abilities. It’s like marathons or triathlons, which are 99% training and 1% racing. This is a hard model: you never feel you are doing enough, and a sense of malcontent hovers over you.

Raise Your Standards

The late Steve Jobs was only inspired by “insanely great” things. He set a high bar for seemingly everything, and anything that didn’t meet his standards was summarily rejected. 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. We should all be thrilled with what we’re doing. So channel your inner Steve Jobs. Aim for insanely great. It’s much more energizing!

Align Your People

Alignment becomes a more important concept as a business grows and there are many moving parts. The question is, are we all pulling on the same oar? Are we all driving in the same direction?
Here alignment matters further is in incentive compensation. We pay everybody the same way on our executive team, and we have a very select, focused set of metrics that we pay bonuses on. Our sales exec does not get paid on a commission plan if the rest of us aren’t. Everybody knows what we are aiming for.

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.
Having clarity is key, or people will just chip away at a problem, without significantly moving the needle. Intentions are often good, but they are then underprioritized, under-resourced, and not fully crystalized.
Vagueness causes confusion, but the 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

In a troubled organization, there’s no rush, no urgency. Why? People have to be there anyway, so what’s the point in moving faster?
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 our 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

Much of this book is about execution, especially developing relentless execution on your core mission. But that doesn’t mean that strategy doesn’t play an exceedingly important role. Once you know how to execute, you will become a better strategist, and strategy can become a force multiplier to your efforts. Transforming your strategy will require you to “widen the aperture” of your thinking about the business model, to reach new and bigger markets. You will need to develop peripheral vision, like a quarterback on a football field.
Thinking about strategy taxes a different part of our brains. It’s more abstract, fluid, dynamic, multidimensional. It requires connecting seemingly unrelated things. This can drive the nuts-and-bolts type of people crazy. It’s like strapping on a different mindset.
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.

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 how-to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early-stage enterprises often feel like they’re shrouded in a fog of war.
In reality, you become haunted by never doing enough, that you are failing to do as much as you are actually capable of.
- In my teens, I held summer jobs that fueled my ambition. I harvested tulip bulbs at a farm in North Holland, walking the fields behind a tractor ten hours a day, in any weather. I also cleaned factory toilets one summer in the plant where my dad worked. There were at least a thousand people working there, and I cycled through every bathroom facility between 9:00 and 5:00. I had a supervisor, who inspected my work, but he often got to bathrooms I had cleaned first thing in the morning many hours later, after hundreds of people had used them. When he criticized my work, I complained about it to my dad. His answer was stark: “Well, those are the kinds of people you will be working for if you don’t get better grades.” I was 16. This mentality of living up to your potential has kept up with me ever since. I am not so much focused day-to-day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation. Doing everything we can to the best of our abilities. It’s like marathons or triathlons, which are 99% training and 1% racing. This is a hard model: you never feel you are doing enough, and a sense of malcontent hovers over you. You need like-minded people around you for this to work. It also causes us to not be good at celebrations. We are so focused on the next thing that victory laps and self-congratulation are not in our DNA. They feel like we’re jinxing ourselves. Instead, we always focus on the challenges in front of us.

Babies grow up to become soldiers

We all need to be careful what “elevator” we get into early in our careers. Some go up, some go down, some don’t move. It’s largely beyond our control, so choose wisely. We have seen staggering examples of this phenomenon in Silicon Valley. Anybody who spent the last 20 years at Google, Amazon, or Apple would have done spectacularly well, regardless of their individual merit. And anyone who stayed with companies like IBM and HP would have stagnated during that period.

Hiring

I still try to hire more for aptitude than experience. We don’t always require been-there, done-that types. Checking boxes on a resume is easy. Assessing aptitude is harder. Look for hunger, attitude, innate abilities. Perhaps, look for the same career-frustrated person I had been all these years. It was quite satisfying to turn this into a high-powered 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.
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.
Data Domain consumed net venture capital of $28 million from inception, and six years later returned $2.4 billion to shareholders— the magic of combining capital with talent, the essence of economics and capitalism. As a former economics academic, I now had a better appreciation of what I had been studying years ago in Rotterdam.

A Very Brief Retirement

I didn’t know it at the time, but by 2017 I was burnt out. After too many years in the line of fire, I felt like I didn’t have much left to give.
It is unlikely that a company other than Snowflake would have persuaded me to get back in the arena, but the opportunity to become its CEO was hard to resist. Today I am less driven by career ambition than by a hunger for sport, action, excitement, teamwork, and a never-ending pursuit of self-improvement. Being retired was great, but the challenge of rising to the occasion is a better match for my temperament.

Snowflake early days

The first few weeks of my tenure were messy, as I quickly removed many of the department heads from their positions. The previous CEO had more than a dozen direct reports, but I was planning on only five or six. The change was coming fast, and I caught flak for removing folks I didn’t know well. Critics said I should have given everyone a fair chance to prove that they could meet my expectations, but I didn’t see it that way. I wanted to eliminate uncertainty and doubt by bringing in some sure-fire executives that I had worked with at previous companies. When you take over a company with a wide range of issues, you have to start solving the more straightforward problems as fast as possible so you can narrow the focus to the harder ones. Bringing in some proven performers was a no-brainer.

Becoming an Amped-Up Leader

The biggest difference between younger me and older me is that I am now much quicker to grasp what’s really going on and what needs to happen to amp up an organization. Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader—but that didn’t mean I was right. As I got more experienced, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody’s time. If we knew that something or someone wasn’t working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.

PART

Raise Your Standards

3 Make Your Organization Mission Driven

What Does It Mean to Be Mission Driven?

The term that best describes the management mindset of all three companies I’ve led (Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake) is mission driven. A clear and compelling sense of mission has been one of the essential keys to our consistent success and growth. Time after time, our focused missions helped us relentlessly pursue each company’s promise and potential. Being mission driven helped our people become motivated, focused, impatient, and passionate— maybe even a bit zealous.
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.

A Great Mission Is Big (but Not Impossible!)

Snowflake’s current mission is to mobilize the world’s data by building the world’s greatest data and applications platform, not just of the cloud era, but in the history of computing. This is a wildly ambitious vision! It massively exceeds in scale and scope what any company has tried to do in this space. We will not simply coast toward that goal, because the world will not let us. But the more determined and focused we are as a group, the greater the odds that we can reach this status. It’s hardly impossible.

A Great Mission Is Clear

The more defined and intense the mission, the easier it will be for everyone to focus on it. When issues and topics unrelated to the mission come up, people will naturally give them less mindshare than they otherwise might. A great mission helps prevent distractions that dilute everyone’s focus. In every company I’ve ever encountered, distractions are a huge threat. They often become a major source of self-defeating behavior.
Continually narrowing the mission aperture is key because companies have a natural tendency to lose focus over time. It’s incredibly easy for managers to react to every headline that crosses their email inbox, Slack, or social media feeds. If you turn your time and attention to the latest shiny object, regardless of how little it has to do with your mission, you are on the path to trouble. Distractions will inevitably pop up every day and need to be fought relentlessly.

A Great Mission Is Not About Money

It’s essential to make it clear to everyone that your organization’s purpose is not exceeding Wall Street’s quarterly expectations or other financial targets. Those are milestones along the way to your true mission. Not that there’s anything wrong with financial metrics or showing progress to investors or shareholders. I take those targets very seriously, but they are never our mission. All of our companies had a true purpose of bringing good things to the world and improving the lives of our customers and employees. Our innovative products changed the status quo.
I would sometimes say in all-hands meetings that I was personally committed to helping each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company’s fortunes. In exchange, I was asking for the best they had to offer. That was the deal: we do the best we can for each other. People sometimes gave me an incredulous look: a CEO who is saying that his goal is to elevate our fortunes? Seriously? Yes, and our companies proved it. Sometimes years after a staffer had moved on, I would still receive an email expressing their appreciation for how much our company had changed their life’s trajectory.

How to Nurture the Mission

Once you have your mission in place, how do you get everyone to embrace it and make it real? The four keys are applying focus, urgency, execution, and strategy.
If people don’t focus on the mission, they are not really on a mission. We concentrate our resources and bandwidth on the mission, and we avoid distractions. That takes discipline. Distractions that can jeopardize the mission are everywhere, and they often seem well-intentioned, honorable, and worthwhile.
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. More pep in our step energizes the workplace culture, making everything seem lighter, quicker, and easier. When everyone on the team embraces urgency, we all move at a similar pace, without being slowed down by distractions.
We have to execute on our mission via an organized, orchestrated, and resourced set of activities. We have no chance accomplishing it without a drive for world-class execution, which includes high standards and efficient use of resources.
Finally, the mission has to be kept in mind when we devise the strategy that we execute on. Strategies don’t change day-to-day, only when there is a demonstrably better way to do things or if something just isn’t working, unrelated to execution failure. Everyone needs to feel confident that our strategy is in line with the goals of our mission.

Living the Mission Every Day

As I go through my week, I continually filter whatever comes over the transom through the lens of Snowflake’s mission. Will this help us get to the data cloud faster? What else can we do to move closer to the mission and get there quicker? Until the mission is fulfilled, I will never be fully satisfied with the status quo.
It’s not easy to live with the constant angst that we might not be doing enough. It would be more fun to do victory laps and pat everybody on the back all the time. But in the end, we will all be better off because of our intensely vigilant posture toward our mission. We won’t rest on our laurels. The competition is getting more aggressive by the day, so this is no time to relax our focus.
Snowflake hired some 800 new teammates in 2020, and we continue to grow rapidly. New folks can’t help but bring some of their old culture from whence they came. Many companies out there are not like us and have a much more casual approach to their mission. But as far as Snowflake is concerned, this is nonnegotiable: we expect everybody to embrace the Snowflake mission with everything they’ve got. This company is counting on our people 100%. All hands on deck, at all times.

4 Declare War on Your Competitors and on Incrementalism

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. I love a win-win deal as much as anyone else, but it’s much more common that business is close to a zero-sum game.
Part of your responsibility as a leader is making this crystal clear to your people. In today’s polite society, many of them will resist the metaphor of war. Life is plenty ugly already; can’t we be more civilized about competing with other firms? 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.
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 persuade 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.

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.
Note how often consumer goods products are marketed as “new and improved.” That’s incrementalism, basically telling customers it’s the same product they already know and love but even better. In other words, don’t worry, we didn’t take anything away from you. People prefer the familiarity of the known over the uncertainty of the unknown. That’s a fine strategy for long-established brands in categories such as breakfast cereal or toothpaste. It’s also fine for industries such as aviation, where change has to come very slowly because there are so many regulatory hurdles to dramatic change.
But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won’t lose, but you won’t win either.
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!
I’ve seen how incrementalism can suck the life force out of people and organizations.
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.
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 resistance—unplanned, incremental growth, leading to mediocrity and waste. One of your biggest responsibilities is to stop that incremental attitude in its tracks.

5 Put Execution Ahead of Strategy

Great Execution Is Rarer than Great Strategy

There are tons of articles and books on the topic of business strategy but relatively few on execution. That strikes me as remarkable because in practice it’s hard to separate strategy from execution. When a business is struggling, how do you know if the problem was caused by a flawed strategy or poor execution? 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.”
Still, most people prefer to discuss strategy rather than execution. Perhaps that’s because they see the former as a more high minded, intellectually stimulating subject, while they see the latter as boring and pedestrian, simply a matter of getting your hands dirty, working hard, and checking action items off to-do lists.
Strategy can’t really be mastered until you know how to execute well. That’s why execution must be your first priority as a leader. Worrying about your organization’s strategy before your team is good at executing is pointless. Execution is hard, and great execution is scarce—which makes it another great source of competitive advantage.
The idea is to take people from a relatively inexperienced station in life on a journey to become elite professionals in their field. Having the prospect of progressing through the ranks like this is a selling point in attracting the best, brightest, and most ambitious. Your entry-level job isn’t just a job; it’s the first step on a clearly defined career trajectory.
One of my favorite observations is that “good judgment comes from bad judgment.” Experience may be overrated by some, but it’s hard to find a substitute for it.

Getting Strategy Right

Even though it is widely overhyped, strategy obviously matters a great deal. You need to figure out what all the alternative approaches are and make hard decisions about why some make more sense than others. This exercise alone is worth your time and effort, as it expands the scope of your leadership team’s discussions.
The problem with strategy development is that it is often reflexive, based on prior experiences and pattern matching at other companies. Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences. It’s also vitally important—yet very difficult—to 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 well-being of the enterprise. It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.
Without strong execution, there is literally no way to know whether a strategy is failing. Eliminate execution as a potential factor first, and then move on to evaluating the strategy. Great execution cannot save a failing strategy, but it will help you decide more quickly whether it’s time to change your strategy.
You should resist this temptation by remembering an old joke: “Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch.” In the long run, you are much better off working on your own strategy, without the fancy language and pretty slide deck. Develop confidence in your own authority, not somebody else’s. Great operators live, breathe, and own their strategies.
The third option is the one I have always chosen: operators in charge of each business unit must also be the strategists for their business, and the chief executive officer must also act as the chief strategy officer. I trust executives with strategy more than so-called strategists because executives are informed by real-life dynamics. They are on the firing line, are responsible for results, and have to live with their choices. In contrast, pure strategists (either outsourced or internal) will be quick to blame the execution, because it is surely not their strategy that is lacking. If you can’t trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, all the consultants in the world can’t fix that problem.
You will become a better strategist as your execution improves. Problems will seem less confusing, with fewer possible explanations for issues. More clarity will lead you to make better decisions, with less random guessing.
The bottom line is that great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy. That’s why, in an amped-up company, execution is king.

PART III

Align Your People and Culture

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

Drivers Wanted

The slogan was based on a Volkswagen commercial at the time: “On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.” 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.
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.”
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 examples 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.

Making the Distinction

This distinction between drivers and passengers can be subtle to discern, and therein lies a problem. Few people are exclusively passengers or exclusively drivers 100% of the time. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. Whenever I bring up this notion of drivers vs. passengers at an all-hands meeting, I can see that it makes some people uncomfortable. They may have never seriously considered the question in an objective and honest manner. At one such meeting, an engineer raised his hand during the Q&A session and asked innocently: “How do I know if I’m a driver or a passenger?” My flippant answer was that he’d better figure it out before I did.
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 drivers.

Getting the Wrong People off the Bus

If you don’t act quickly to get the wrong people off the bus, you have no prayer of changing the overall trajectory. We often believe, naively, that we can coach struggling teammates to a better place. And sometimes we can, but those cases are rarer than we imagine. At a struggling company, you need to change things fast, which can only happen by switching out the people whose skills no longer fit the mission or perhaps never really did in the first place.
The other advantage of moving fast is that everyone who stays on the bus will know that you’re dead serious about high standards.
Leaders who do not act will soon find out that their leadership is in question. Everybody is watching: not just what you are doing but also what you are not doing. Ultimately, leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with. Once you get good at both hiring and firing, you are well on your way to great results and a thriving career.

7 Build a Strong Culture

Culture Matters More than You Think

Few words invoke more variety of meaning than culture. What does it mean in the context of a business organization? For our purposes, it loosely defines the dominant and persistent patterns of behaviors, beliefs, norms, and values of a workplace community. Culture describes how people come together as a group on a day-to-day basis.
Culture matters more than you think, and it is not optional. A strong culture can greatly help organizations and become an enduring source of competitive advantage. But a weak culture can easily destroy organizations from within.
An important question here is to what aim do you direct your culture. All platitudes and high-minded principles aside, the culture needs to serve the mission of the enterprise. Sounds obvious? It isn’t. Most enterprises aim for making employees feel good, secure, and safe in their roles. They are aiming for strong net promoter scores (NPS) on their employee surveys. Management is angling for kudos for their virtuous leadership style. While there is nothing wrong with good intentions, we need to align the culture with the mission.
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. Culture needs to become a cohesive force in the enterprise. We need our best and brightest to wholeheartedly buy into the mission, as well as a culture that enables that. Cultures sort and sift between people who buy into it and those who do not. That’s okay. One size doesn’t have to fit all.
Like it or not, your company has a culture, whether or not you care about it or actively try to influence it. The people you hire bring elements of culture with them and influence the culture they enter, often unwittingly. It is essential that leaders grab ahold of it, and start driving it to a desired state. Culture can become a force multiplier, but it doesn’t just happen with good intentions.
The key to driving a consistent culture is not just having high- minded principles and values. Many leaders seem to think it’s easy to assemble a committee, agree on a set of values, print up some posters, put them up everywhere around the office, and voilà, there is our culture. The problem is that people don’t learn from posters. Like children and pets, they learn from consequences and the lack thereof. If you want to drive a more consistent set of behaviors, norms, and values, you have to focus on consistent and clearly defined consequences, day in and day out.
When you get it right, people will feel protective of the culture and call out deviations, peer to peer. That’s the sign of a culture that’s really pulsing through your organization.
As you evaluate your own culture, ask yourself a few key questions. When you talk to frontline employees, do they seem energized, or does it feel like everyone is swimming in glue? Do people have clarity of purpose and a sense of mission and ownership? Do they share the same big dreams of where the organization might be in a few years? Do most people execute with urgency and pep in their step? Do they consistently pursue high standards in projects, products, talent, everything?
If you succeed in building and protecting a strong culture, it will simultaneously attract people who admire the culture while repelling those who find it distasteful. That’s an intentional feature, not a bug. The degree to which people embrace your culture will give you a huge indicator of who will help the organization reach its goals and who might be dragging you down.

8 Teach Everyone to Go Direct and Build Mutual Trust

A Better Option: Going Direct

We have a saying we often repeat at our companies: Go direct. If you have a problem that cuts across departments, figure out who in those other departments can most directly help you address the issue, and reach out without hesitation. Everybody, and we mean everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. We want the organization to run on influence, not rank and title. We want everyone to think of the company as one big team, not a series of competing smaller teams.
We also expect that all attempts to contact another person will be acknowledged promptly and responded to thoughtfully. It is not acceptable to ignore a colleague just because you outrank someone or don’t feel like dealing with their concerns. I have seen people coming from other companies act that way, and we correct such behavior the moment we become aware of it. To set an example, I personally respond to any employee who emails me. It might just be a brief sentence redirecting them to someone else, but they will get a reply.
It often takes a lot of communication and reinforcement to make going direct a core part of your culture. Our employees have heard me explain this concept numerous times, because the reflex to go vertical rather than horizontal is so strong. 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.
My role as CEO is to facilitate their initiative and encourage them to reach creative solutions, not simply to tell them what to do. Everyone gets a seat at the table as we hash out challenging issues.

Building Trust

Going direct will only work as a strategy if your people default to trusting their colleagues in other departments, even though they don’t have a direct reporting relationship with them. Trust is foundational to team effectiveness—it’s impossible to overstate how important it is. Organizations where most people trust each other have a much higher quality of life than those who do not. They focus their energies more on the organization’s priorities, rather than checking up on whether colleagues are doing what they’re supposed to be doing or whether someone is out to sabotage them. Trust never just happens—it needs to be earned and developed. Everyone has to aim for it and work on it constantly. The business affords constant opportunities to both earn and lose trust. People can detect an untrustworthy colleague quickly, almost by instinct. Most of us start off relationships with a show-me attitude, rather than blind trust, and a single disappointing experience can make it hard to recover. Once burnt, twice shy, as the saying goes.
Trust is not always absolute, as if you either have it or you don’t. Some people, teams, and departments are partially, tentatively trusted. Others you learn not to turn your back on, because they are clearly and actively at odds with your objectives.
In low-trust environments, people quickly learn to play defense. They craft their actions based on how vulnerable they feel against the indifference or outright sabotage of their colleagues. They may well survive that way, but the organization as a whole will struggle. We cannot succeed when everybody is preoccupied with their personal survival, not the company’s.
My favorite framing of this idea is from Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a conceptual framework we have used over the years to assess how functional we were as a team.

The Benefits of a High-Trust Environment

High-trust workplace cultures tend to correlate with high-performance organizations. In a high-trust team, people call each other out, without reservation, for the good of the business; no one feels put on the spot or made to look bad. If people can trust that everyone’s motivations are honorable, not political, it allows them to focus on the problems and challenges of the business without getting defensive. People don’t need to defend bad decisions in a high-trust environment. They can acknowledge a failure and move on quickly.
By 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. But that can only happen in an environment of safety and trust.

PART IV

Sharpen Your Focus

9 Put Analysis Before Solutions

The Problem of Racing to Solutions

The medical profession is “diagnosis-centric” in the way it goes about treating conditions. This isn’t surprising—how can anyone treat a patient effectively without a correct diagnosis, especially in the age of huge malpractice lawsuits? So doctors are trained to spend significant time running tests and eliminating possible causes. Only after a diagnosis is established can treatment protocols be implemented. And even then, doctors are taught to remain vigilant in case the treatment isn’t working, which might signal a mistaken diagnosis. Life science is a murky business, and even the experts can’t take anything for granted.
But business, I’ve found, has the opposite cultural tendency. We tend to be “solution-centric”—we spend most of our time discussing solutions rather than diagnosing problems. We race to conclusions about what’s wrong and what to do about it. We pattern match, reacting to situations based on our individual experiences rather than studying the specific situation in front of us from a broader perspective.
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.
Another cause of jumping to solutions is groupthink, which discourages new, creative, unexpected ways of thinking.

How to Focus on Analysis

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.
How can you get good at doing rational analysis before jumping to conclusions and train your people to maintain intellectual honesty?
My preferred tactic is to 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.
In meetings, I often object to presentations where 90% of the content is about the solution, not the problem. My co-workers find it frustrating that I always want to walk back to the beginning rather than rubber-stamp a program or project. They want to jump right into the action phase, so they see in-depth discussion about possible explanations as a waste of time. Of course, when you end up being wrong about the problem and therefore ineffective, that’s a much more serious waste of time. Once you start examining and pulling a problem apart, the perspective often changes the range of possibilities. That often prevents a mistake that would have forced us to backtrack later on—wasting time, effort, and money in the process.
How do you know if your analysis of a new hire was wrong? Several times a year we conduct what we call “calibration” sessions (which I already mentioned in Chapter 6), where each department head presents to their peers, profiling the performance and potential of their direct reports. The purpose is to highlight who we think are our ascending stars, who is struggling, and who is a serious concern. The department heads try to be as objective as possible, while relying on their peer group for a reality check on each assessment.
Any one of us individually might be biased, but the peer group is usually clear in its evaluation of talent. People end up either embraced or rejected by the peer group, with rarely much of a middle ground. In strong cultures, the managerial peer group can act like antibodies, rejecting a dangerous foreign substance before it can wreck the health of the organism.
These calibration sessions can be difficult, but they highlight any lack of congruence in the organization, if it exists. They also force us to face our demons: are we tolerating less-than-stellar performance in certain roles? Invariably that is the case to one degree or another. Could and should we aspire to do better? Analysis sharpens perceptions that tend to get dull in the daily hustle and bustle. Taking time out to explicitly discuss these topics can be invigorating.

Customer Success Is Everyone’s Business

The alternative strategy is to declare and constantly reinforce that customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department. This means that when a problem arises, every department has a responsibility to fix it. Everyone’s incentives should be fully aligned with what’s good for our customers.
If the basic functions of the company are working properly and are held to account, you won’t need a separate department.
If your product is so bad that it requires an army of hand holders, then apply extra resources to fix the product. And if there’s a more garden-variety problem, urge everyone to take it seriously and address it directly. In any of those scenarios, creating a new department doesn’t add any additional value. It just lets other departments that may have disappointed a customer off the hook. Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries. The product developers and salespeople who work directly with a customer should never surrender responsibility for that customer’s well-being, which directly affects their career progress as well as the company’s results. That way, everyone’s incentives are aligned. It’s even better if multiple departments overlap in terms of their scope so that no customer can fall through the cracks.

V PART

Pick Up the Pace

11 Ramp Up Sales

Sales Growth Is About Timing

In my 2009 book, Tape Sucks, I wrote: “There comes a time when the venture must pivot from conserving resources to applying them rapidly, as fast as you know how to do effectively—when that crossover time comes is not always obvious.”
This is one of the questions I hear most often from entrepreneurs: How do you know when to ramp up a start-up’s sales? There’s no simple answer, but I can share some additional questions that should help you draw your own conclusions:

Are you happy with your current sales productivity metrics? If not, how can you improve productivity before adding more sales headcount?
Are you happy with the metrics of your lead generation pipeline? If not, how can you improve it?
▪ Are you being realistic in your timeline of sales targets? Are you projecting too much too soon, or too little too late?
Are you being aggressive enough and thinking big enough to outpace your competition?
Is your sales team buying into your targets and timeline? Are they owning the goals and fully committed to hitting them?

Conclusion

Putting gasoline into a car’s tank won’t matter if the engine isn’t working. Likewise, you can hire all the salespeople in the world, but they won’t pay off until you’ve figured out your product, your market, your demand and lead generation systems, and the kinds of selling motions that will convert prospects to customers.
If you have a sales force that’s stuck in the mud, don’t just complain about the staff’s failure to hit your targets and timeline. Ask lots of questions to figure out what’s wrong. Then take bold steps to mitigate the problem as soon as you understand it. You can’t simply take a “wait and see” posture while hoping the metrics will improve. You have to aggressively manage nonperformance, cut headcount if appropriate, or add headcount wherever you have the highest probability of converting sales potential to sales yield. Add headcount where managers have a record of converting them to yield and vice versa: do not add headcount to regions where things clearly are not figured out. That’s hoping and praying, not sales management. Equally important is making sure that your salespeople have the resources they need, including experienced and productive managers and colleagues.

12 Grow Fast or Die Slow

Why Focus on Growth?

“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, which McKinsey defined as 60% or more annual growth, had five times higher returns than medium growth companies (which had less than 20% annual growth). Super growers also had an eight times greater likelihood of reaching $1 billion in annual revenue.
The study found that when evaluating a young company, growth matters even more than profit margin or cost structure. Increases in growth drove twice as much valuation increase than equivalent improvements in profitability. No correlation was observed between cost structure and growth.
Wall Street has never needed a consultant’s report to understand the magic of growth.

Two Problems: Uncertainty and Fear

One major reason is that too few leaders truly grasp the importance of growth. They have the misguided belief that their mission is to rethink ch 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.
I have often distinguished between actual profitability and what we call “inherent profitability.” Profitability is typically distorted in high-growth enterprises because so much of the current period costs are associated with future period revenue. The question is what would profitability look like if we substantially stopped investing for future periods altogether? Inherent profitability is driven by unit economics or the gross margin line in the profit and loss statement. If things cost more than what we sell them for, the business will obviously never become profitable.
In my experience, anxiety about growth is a bigger problem than ignorance about growth. Leaders become afraid to burn too many resources or to make hard choices about where to invest their limited capital. Some are afraid that if the enterprise gets too big, they will lose control. Others are afraid that if they really go for it on growth, they may spin out and humiliate themselves. So they play it safe. But trying to hang on to a modest business doesn’t mean you have a viable business. Your competitors will surely try to take those customers away from you.
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.
I have personally been involved with more such ventures than I care to recall. Early on, in my naivete, I defaulted to inspecting their operational effectiveness. But that’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; the ship will still go down unless it substantially alters course. In business that means confronting the question of commercial viability. 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.

Build a Growth Model That Stretches Your Goals

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? Surprisingly, the response is often a blank stare. “Growth model? Not sure what you mean by that.” Sometimes they throw the question back at me. “How fast do you think we should grow?” Or perhaps, “We’re on track for 30% growth this year. Do you think that’s good enough?” How can I possibly answer those questions for someone else’s business? The answers are relative and situational. For some companies in certain situations, 30% might be superlative, but for others it may be grossly underperforming. That’s why you need a growth model—to understand the many factors that will enhance or limit your opportunities for growth.
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.
You may find at some point that you are overspending on growth and investing ineffectively, but that’s a rare situation. It’s much more likely that you will get better and better at optimizing for higher growth rates and bigger goals. We can theorize all we want, but ultimately, we all learn best by doing. In my case, every company I led was a super grower, but in hindsight I could have productively applied even more resources, even more aggressively than I did. All my experiences have taught me that when in doubt, you should lean in and try to grow faster.

Continuing to Grow After You’re Already Big

Growing is hard when you’re a small start-up, but continuing to grow after you reach scale can be even harder. People naturally expect growth to slow when business gets to a certain scale. Don’t give in to that assumption too quickly. Unlike the law of gravity, there’s no law that momentum naturally has to slow as your revenues climb higher and higher. It’s the size of your addressable market that dictates limits. Growth tends to slow down when you are starting to become well penetrated and saturated.
A higher-probability 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 market—without trying to strike gold a second time.

13 Stay Scrappy as You Scale Up

The Paradox of Scaling Up

One trap that leaders often fall into is failing to adjust to the natural life cycle of a company as it grows and evolves. If you try to run a mature, 500-person company like a 10-person start-up, you will almost certainly fail. But, paradoxically, if you lose all the scrappiness of a 10-person start-up, your mature company may never reach its full potential.

Let’s look at the three main phases of a company’s development and what’s demanded of leadership at each stage.

The Embryonic Company

In the embryonic stage of a start-up, seed capital is applied to assess the feasibility of an idea, followed by subsequent rounds of funding to build the initial product. The team is usually a small, close-knit group that are laser-focused on building that first product.

The Formative Company

The formative stage starts when there is enough product to begin testing the market. You can finally connect with potential customers, letting them see, touch, and smell the product. You can get valuable feedback and experiment with pricing and support models. The goal at this stage is to find out if you really have a viable product or merely a technology in search of a problem to solve.
At this point the leadership challenge is bigger because you have to make huge decisions about how to price, position, sell, and promote your product. Headcount is starting to climb, which will introduce HR challenges.
The key thing to remember is that you cannot brute force your way into any market. If you are met with lackluster response in the early going, it’s time to go back to the drawing board, make sense of the feedback, and figure out your next set of moves. Trying to double down or triple down on spending to cross the chasm is a recipe for disaster.
The time to open the floodgates is when you have made it through the chasm and are confident that scaling up sales and marketing will convert a critical mass of new customers.

The Scaled-Up Company

Scale is about maximizing growth by building repeatable, efficient processes and models of execution. We are no longer learning the basics; we have successfully reached adolescence, if not adulthood, and now we need to start acting like it.

Hang ON to Your Early-Stage Dynamism

Your mission as a leader is to figure out how to hang on to your early-stage dynamism and avoid the lethargy of mass and bulk. One technique I use is to challenge key people with this question: “If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?” The reason is that as companies get bigger, they start advancing numerous initiatives simultaneously. Before they even realize it, people start moving like molasses and lose their sense of focus. Try to regain that by narrowing the aperture on priorities.
Similarly, I ask our teams what’s the one thing we should be doing urgently that we are not doing for some reason? This is to avoid getting too engrossed in day-to-day activities and failing to see the forest for the trees. Always be paranoid about what you are not doing but should be. And, conversely, what are you doing that’s of marginal value but crowding our more essential ways to use our time and resources?

PART VI

Transform Your Strategy

14 Materialize Your Opportunities— the Data Domain Growth Story

Takeaway 1: Attack weakness, not strength.

Popular incumbents are hard to assail, but in this case, no one really liked tape automation systems.

Takeaway 2: Either create a cost advantage or neutralize someone else’s.

When businesses are making major purchase decisions, they usually don’t care how their IT people feel about one product versus another. Economic imperatives rule.

Takeaway 3: It’s much easier to attack an existing market than create a new one.

Creating so-called new categories out of thin air is a favorite cocktail party topic among marketers, but it doesn’t happen that often. (Apple is often the exception, with category-defining innovations such as the iPod and iPad.) When a truly new market does appear, it’s usually due to a confluence of industry-wide factors and circumstances, not the innovations of just one company.

Takeaway 4: Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.

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 forward-looking (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.
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 cutting-edge they are.
Late adopters—a much bigger area under the bell curve—are 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 cost-effective. That’s when the broader market will become accessible to your pitch.

Takeaway 5: Stay close to home in the early going.

If you can’t sell close to home, you will surely fail farther afield. The closer your early customers are, the more easily you can communicate with them and gather useful feedback. You can also swarm nearby customers with more resources and attention. That’s why it’s no accident that Silicon Valley companies are especially likely to launch close to home. Local tech companies are kindred spirits, tech-savvy, and classic early adopters. They’re also well connected and prone to talk to their friends and acquaintances at other companies. Data Domain worked hard to build up a core of about 50 customers in Northern California before we tried to expand to more remote territories.

Takeaway 6: 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. Try to deliver a complete solution so you won’t be so vulnerable to displacement.

Takeaway 7: Bet on the correct enabling technologies.

Takeaway 8: 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.

Takeaway 9: 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?

15 Open the Aperture—the ServiceNow Expansion Story

How to Spot a Potential Super-Grower

First, I was stunned by ServiceNow’s extraordinary growth rate as of 2011. Something rare and special must be going on when a company can rack up such huge gains year after year.
Second, the incumbents in this market, HP and BMC, were not popular with customers. Their products were aging, architecturally deficient, complicated, and hard to support. If you recall one of the takeaways from the previous chapter, it’s always better to attack weakness rather than strength. ServiceNow seemed to have a golden opportunity to capture the customers of these unpopular incumbents.
I remember conversations later on with executives at several large institutions who were literally pleading for the chance to replace their old ticketing systems with ServiceNow.
The third factor that elevated my interest was a conversation with founder Fred Luddy, who revealed that ServiceNow was starting to be used for completely different use cases, beyond IT service management. Human resources departments and event managers had discovered and liked the software. This meant that it had the makings of a generic workflow platform that could address any service domain. Customers saw something that software analysts and industry pundits didn’t: This was a platform, not a tool. A tool is a one-trick pony, but a platform is broadly capable of many different uses.
Finally, the company’s venture investor showed me the highlights of a transcript of every conversation the VC firm had had with customers over the previous year. This is fairly standard operating procedure for investor due diligence. It was about a 60-page document, packed from top to bottom with enthusiastic quotes and comments. Customers not only loved the product, but they also loved ServiceNow’s people. It’s rare to read such superlative and consistent praise about a company.
Whenever you make a major career decision, it’s impossible to know everything, but I now knew enough about ServiceNow. I was all in.

16 Swing for the Fences—the Snowflake Growth Story

Playing Your Strategic Cards

Running a company is somewhat like playing a hand in poker. You may or may not be dealt good cards, but what matters even more is understanding the potential of the cards you were dealt. They will dictate your strategic options—whether you should call, raise, or fold at every round of the hand. As you decide how to play your own cards, remember that it’s not simply a matter of how large your current addressable market is. Sure, bigger is better, much better. But the question is how big your market will be in a few years. When external circumstances change, companies that run out of potential new markets to grow into are often forced into acquisitions or other desperate measures.
One solution may be to reframe your market as a subset of a larger market. For instance, the desktop computer market has shrunk to almost nothing, but desktop makers that expanded successfully into laptops and tablets have been thriving. The overall computing category is much broader now. Likewise, we expect data warehousing to end up as a subset of the much broader category of cloud data operations.

PART VII

The Amped-Up Leader

17 Amp Up Your Career

You Are a Product

Are you happy with your upward progress in your career? Could you go faster? Probably. Most people manage their careers in a haphazard fashion, jumping from role to role as new opportunities pop up. Being more purposeful about your career can amp up your forward momentum.

Education Matters Some . . . . . . But Experience Matters More

Aptitude Matters Most

Aptitudes are your God-given talents, whatever you are innately good at. Employers can give you experience, but they can’t give you aptitude. Experience can help reveal your aptitudes, but hiring managers often don’t try hard enough to understand and discern them. 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.
If you are light on experience for a role you want, redirect the conversation to aptitudes. Why would you be great in this position?

Personality Tips the Scales

An energetic, engaging personality goes a long way in the workplace, as it does in every sphere of our culture. In politics, for instance, credentials seem to be completely subordinated by personality. It can sometimes compensate for lesser credentials, though less so in technical fields such as engineering and finance. But since everybody works in teams to one extent or another, the ability to collaborate as a team player is always at a premium.
As you think about which aspects of your personality to put front and center, be mindful of the culture you are trying to join. A person who may be a great fit in one place may be a terrible match in another. When you’re interviewed for a job, some of the best questions you can ask are, What types of people succeed best in this company? And which do not? And why?
Start-ups typically need hard drivers, passionate leaders, goal-oriented and achievement-focused personalities—the kind of people who are easily frustrated in larger, more rigid, slower to evolve enterprises. We often liked people with a chip on their shoulder, who had a lot to prove to themselves and others. But it is easy to see how others would be less enamored by such personalities.

Develop Your Communication Skills

One often-neglected skill set that can boost your career is your ability to communicate well, in both speaking and writing.

Hold On to Your Long-Term Goals

Most people embark on a career with only the foggiest notion of what their ultimate goal is. What do you want to be when you grow up? Resumes often reflect job-to-job opportunism and look like random walks. The choices we make along the way can be hard to rationalize in hindsight.
Having an endgame in mind will help you play a short game and a long game simultaneously. If you study the bios of successful people you admire, you’ll see how each short-term job move helped set up bigger moves in the future. Each role gives you an opportunity to develop new mentoring relationships with people who inspire you and to bolster your network of peers. So you should evaluate each potential new role based on what it can do for you in the long run, not just immediate benefits such as salary, location, a prestigious title, or where your friends are working.

Do Not Unduly Focus on Title and Pay

Embrace the Struggle

Lots of people tell graduates to “follow your passion,” but it’s borderline insane to think that everything will turn out fine if all you do is chase your dream career. We rarely get what we wish for, but we have at least a shot at getting what we strive, work, and fight for. Pick a field where you have a realistic chance of rising, and turn your less realistic passions—such as playing basketball, sailing, performing music, or painting—into hobbies for your free time. In your work life, try to embrace your struggles rather than avoid them. Yes, they may be hard, painful, even terrorizing. But hardships are incredibly formative and educational. They are ultimately the experiences that shape and make careers, and future employers will value your hard-fought struggles. Try to take roles and assignments where the rubber meets the road, where hard but essential problems have to be solved. The further away you get from your company’s real action, the slower your career will progress. As time unfolds, you will appreciate the hard times the most.

19 Conclusion—Great Leaders Have Great Outcomes

- 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 leaders—including 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.
- I’ve known many young CEOs who have all the prerequisites on paper: they’re smart, energetic, hard-working, ambitious. But then they get handed a big leadership role before they’ve had the necessary experiences to discover their own path. As a result, they often get bruised and bloodied. As hard as it can be to suffer the indignity of failure, those bad experiences later become the bedrock of their future success.
- Only in hindsight will you truly realize what your experiences have meant. That is why it’s okay to embrace your inevitable challenges and setbacks as part of your journey. They are there for a reason.
- At the end of the day, great leaders at any level have great outcomes. You can be the most empathetic, charismatic, and popular leader ever, but none of that will matter if your business falls short. And when it does, there will be nowhere for you to hide. No one will care about your legitimate explanations, let alone your excuses. No one will care about the unlucky breaks that were completely beyond your control. Is that fair? Of course not! But it’s the world we live in, the world we have to accept as leaders.

The good news is that if you persevere over long periods of time if you focus intensely on delivering value for customers, and if you build a disciplined culture for your employees, it will all pay off in the long run. You will drive great outcomes for your organization and reap the rewards. It’s hard to beat any leader who combines great resolve, persistence, mission focus, and clarity about what is and is not important. It’s hard to beat any leader who truly amps it up.