Amp It Up

Last updated Apr 6, 2025 Edit Source

• Book
• Business

Date Finished: Apr 0, 2025 Author: Frank Slootman Tags:

“Amp It Up!” is a book for leaders which encourages them to raise standards, energy, and pace within organizations to achieve higher goals. It emphasizes the importance of clear priorities, tight team alignment, and a mission-driven strategy that inspires and centers attention on core values. Key points also include the role of organizational culture, effective execution, and eliminating mediocrity to enhance business outcomes.

Recommended by (7) Frank B. Georgiew 高傅安 | LinkedIn

C level leaders - CEOs especially

I understood why this is importand and why the organization where I work in is build and managed in the way it is.

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.

At various times Frank has been a venture capitalist, a board member, and a corporate executive, but in his opinion, no experience in business compares to being CEO. It’s about being fully accountable for a company’s leadership, strategy, culture, and execution in an ultra-competitive marketplace.

He also believes you can only get these insights from a fellow traveler. No offense to VC friends, but they often think that their investments give them the right to lecture entrepreneurs at board meetings, even though many VCs have never been in the combat seat themselves. Having seen things done is not the same as doing them.

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. Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It’s okay,” or “It’s not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn’t the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.

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.

Things can go bad very quickly in an organization when the leadership team is weak or gets distracted. Without focused leadership, millions of conflicting priorities compete with each other. Human nature being what it is, many people will slow their output to a glacial pace and adopt “good enough” as their standard. Then the best people in the organization get frustrated and start to leave, as talent and energy go untapped and dormant.

Where 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. 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.

As an exercise, Frank often asks: if you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, and nothing else, what would it be and why?

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?

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 on 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 experience, 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.

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.

We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime. They will be motivated and driven, with a can-not-fail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us.

I still apologize to CEOs who in later years were lectured on Data Domain as a role model. 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.

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.

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. And if most people at your company feel that way, the enterprise is in grave danger.

The mission clarity that used to be the norm has now become more of an exception—which gives leaders who get it right a competitive advantage. Now let’s look at the three criteria for a great mission: big, clear, and not about money.

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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.

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.

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.

I would sometimes say in all‐hands meetings that I was personally committed to help 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?

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.”

A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend past gains. 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!

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.

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

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.

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.

It is not unusual now to see CEOs in their early to mid‐30s. I have worked with many of these upstarts in an advisory capacity. They are smart, ambitious, hard‐working, and driven—but many simply have never had a chance to observe excellent execution or an opportunity to make useful, educational mistakes. 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.

You need both innovation and discipline, or the place will simply implode on itself. The common mistake is relying on our innovators to also provide discipline. Those things rarely go hand in hand, if ever.

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you’re offering doesn’t resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

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.” 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.

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.

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 largely dead weight and can be an insidious threat to your culture and performance. They inadvertently undermine the mojo of the organization. They sap the animal instinct and spirits you need in business to thrive.

(…) 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 example of what others should aspire to. That will start waking up those who are merely along for the ride.

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. That was good for a few laughs, but the underlying message was that we need to ask more of ourselves so the answer will become self‐evident. If you can’t answer the question in an overwhelmingly positive manner, you are probably too much of a passenger.

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.

Passengers are the first to be thrown overboard during a so‐called reduction in force (RIF), better known as a mass layoff. It is not unusual to see organizations actually perk up after a RIF because all those passengers are no longer dead weight.

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. The good ones will be energized by those standards. If others start looking for greener, less‐ demanding pastures because they don’t want to meet those standards, that’s fine too. I know this philosophy may come across as harsh. But what’s even harsher is not doing the job you were hired to do as a leader. If you can’t find the backbone to make necessary changes, you are holding everyone else back from reaching their full potential.

Perform what we call active “calibration” sessions on critical positions in a group format. In these sessions, executives and managers present evaluations of their direct reports and seek feedback from the peer group outside their chain of command. The idea here is to discern if the manager’s evaluation of the person in question is either shared, questioned, or outright challenged by the broader organization.

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.

Culture describes how people come together as a group on a day‐to‐day basis. Is yours respectful, fluid, engaging, constructive, demanding, urgent, and creative? Or is it dragging, political, CYA, risk-avoiding, and confrontational? Workplaces are capable of all of those and many more. 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.

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.

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.

When not much is done to drive a cohesive, consistent culture across the organization, you end up with an amalgamation of different value systems across functions and geographies. Dominant personalities will set the tone in smaller subgroups. That’s the pattern in places with a weak culture: lots of fiefdoms that spend their days fighting each other more than they fight the competition.

Many successful organizations rightfully point to their culture as a key source of that success. It’s often the one differentiator that others can’t copy. Your competitors can gain access to capital, hire away your talent, and steal your ideas, but they almost certainly can’t replicate your culture.

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.

Customer is the center of everything. A lot of companies know that, but you’d be surprised at how many do not. It’s another area that gets a lot of lip service, but people often don’t act on the importance of customers when it truly matters. I always used strong language about our customers: we don’t leave any of them behind, ever. We have their backs through thick and thin. Their outcomes are our outcomes. I urged our people to feel empowered to act forcefully on behalf of customers. Not just the big, strategic customers but all of them. No exceptions. I’ve been in companies that thought employees should be number one because they reasoned that well‐treated employees would therefore treat customers the best. Why be indirect about it? We don’t have any reason to exist without our customers.

Life is much easier when all stakeholders believe you are telling the truth because you have been truthful at every turn previously.

Confronting a lack of performance is never fun, but has to be done at all levels of the organization—based on data and facts, not negative emotions. Accountability is uncomfortable because we all live with the anxiety of not being good enough and the anxiety of telling others they aren’t good enough. But if you want a great company, you can’t give out free passes for mediocrity. Good enough is never good enough.

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.

Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos. Everybody tries to stay within their own organizational lanes, including the leaders running those lanes.

Too many managers and executives try to maintain a shield around their silo and require those inside to obtain permission to speak to anyone outside. These insecure control freaks are far more common than you might imagine.

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.

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.

People always monitor the variance between what you say and what you do—and especially how you treat the staff. They will detect the slightest patterns of misrepresentation, which, over time, convert to discounts on promises.

At the first quarterly all‐hands meeting I explained how, through proper focus and execution, not hoping and praying, the valuation of the company could reach 10x in a matter of 12–18 months. I saw plenty of disbelief in people’s eyes that day, but we did end up taking the company public at 13–14x that day’s number, and the stock doubled again on the first day of trading. I received many emails that week from employees, recalling that fateful day a year earlier when we made that 10x projection. One employee said in his note: “We didn’t believe you that day, but you did exactly what you said you would do.”

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.

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 experience rather than studying the specific situation in front of us from a broader perspective.

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.

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.

One big challenge of early‐stage selling is insufficient demand, so we decided that we had to give our new reps a ton of leads they could follow up on, right away. A busy sales funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team, while allowing management to study the biggest sales challenges and see how the top performers are overcoming them. Conversely, if you skimp on resources for lead generation, your sales reps will end up having only a couple of meetings a week. That’s demoralizing; they are literally dying on the vine. High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.

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.

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.

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 is 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. The next question is how operating efficiency will benefit from increased scale. Those answers help us understand what the inherent profitability of the business really is.

Accounting can become the bastardization of economics when it obfuscates the inherent profitability of the business by focusing on current period income and expenses.

Silicon Valley is littered with companies lingering in the proverbial chasm for years and years. Their venture capitalists and management teams hope beyond hope that someday they will finally catch fire. 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.

For instance, at Data Domain we initially set our growth targets conservatively because we were so afraid to get too far over our skis and lose credibility with our board of directors, a common sentiment among management teams. But this is the wrong instinct; I’d rather ratchet up growth expectations and fall short than not even reach for it. Behavior is informed, if not driven, by expectations.

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.

I know I said earlier that growth should be prioritized over profitability, but when it costs much more than a dollar to generate a dollar, you don’t really have a business. This was not a problem we would naturally outgrow, as the company had believed previously.

First, we needed to balance Snowflake’s compensation plans with financial discipline. There is an organizational element to this: you simply cannot let your sales function run their own compensation plans. That’s like letting the proverbial fox run the hen house. Compensation plans need to be precisely modeled against revenues to see what the effects will be at various levels of performance. Incentives also need to align with the company’s objectives, not just the salesperson.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have strong financial oversight and discipline on sales compensation. You may be tempted at some point to make your comp plans more generous to recruit and retain top sales talent, but abandoning financial rigor can be a fatal mistake - not just during the planning stages of each year but every day, literally from one sales deal to the next.

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.

The team is usually a small, close-knit group who are laser-focused on building that first product. It has always amazed me how much can be accomplished with a founding team of fewer than a dozen people, often only a half dozen. You will never revisit those levels of productivity again. At this point, the CEO job is more or less a part-time position for someone who is also the leader of a key function, such as technology or operations. Everyone is working, not managing.

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.

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. A rapid expansion of resources will accelerate your cash burn, often too quickly. As I noted in the chapter on ramping sales, there is no point in hiring ten salespeople when you don’t yet know how to make even one salesperson productive.

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. For some companies, such as Data Domain, the formative stage takes years until the product improves enough to attract a large market. But because we had spent plenty of time to prepare for scale, our management team was solid, our culture was well established, and we were ready to throw the big switch and begin applying massive resources to fuel our growth.

It’s useful to distinguish between these stages of evolution because the operational modes are so different. Many leaders fail because they cling to old habits after they should have shifted gears. CEOs and boards need to be aware of the danger signs that a leadership team is stuck in an earlier stage of development.

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.

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.

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.

Many folks find themselves in the career doldrums and think an MBA might be the ticket to busting out. The business schools desperately want you to believe that. Yes, an MBA from a good university looks good on a resume. But there can be a huge opportunity cost to getting an MBA and not only in the salary you’d be giving up for two years. Your time away from your field will put you behind on experience compared to your peers.

Build your record of accomplishments thoughtfully. Having a bunch of roles on your resume without clear success at each one can become a strike against you. You start to look like a passenger, not a driver. Avoid having a series of short‐tenured jobs on your resume, especially if you can’t name specific accomplishments at each one. It is hard to lay real tracks at any workplace in just 12‐ to‐ 18‐ month stints. You may be unhappy and frustrated in your current role, but try to stick around long enough to make something of it.

Several short tenures in a row also imply that you had poor judgment in choosing those roles or perhaps that you’re the kind of person who gets into chronic conflicts with management. One brief tenure will be seen as a fluke by future employers, but a series of them will be seen as a red flag. The shortest tenure I ever had was three years; all of my others were in the five‐ to‐ seven‐ year range.

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.

A big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low-maintenance, low-drama personalities. We valued traits such as strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, and a “no excuses” mentality. People who get things done rather than explain why they can’t. This personality type lines up with our obsession with hiring drivers rather than passengers, as we saw in an earlier chapter.

One often‐neglected skill set that can boost your career is your ability to communicate well, in both speaking and writing. How many rambling, poorly composed emails do you see these days? How many take you through the confusion and hell of the writer’s mind? How many announcements do you read that bury the real news below several paragraphs of throat‐ clearing trivia?

Do Not Unduly Focus on Title and Pay. This follows naturally from long-term focus. In the first ten or so years out of college, don’t worry too much about your salary or job title. Those years are all about building a strong foundation to launch your career. A fancy title and big paycheck won’t help in the long run if you’re not in a good role at a good company in a good industry.

Sometimes your career may get stuck at a certain plateau, no matter how hard you’ve been working to move up. For good people, career doldrums are usually a function of not being in a growing industry and/ or a thriving company. In companies and industries that are dynamic and on the move, people with talent often get promoted even before they are fully ready for a new role. But if you find yourself in the opposite situation, you will have to take the initiative to change your trajectory.

First, realize that you’re not a founder, and you will never be. Many employees will view you as an interloper, at least at first. The founders may have achieved near-mythical status by what they already accomplished, so what exactly warrants your presence here? The longest-serving employees tend to be the most prone to nostalgia, constantly reliving the romance of the early days. Those days always seem better in retrospect than they did at the time.

Always speak and act with deference toward the founders. You are there to help them realize the promise of their original vision. As CEO, you will eventually get plenty of credit as well as blame, but keep the founders on a pedestal. They earned it, and they belong there.

Especially with new CEOs, boards often try to establish a probationary period, when the CEO has to check in frequently. But if they treat you like a teenager with a curfew, how will they know when you’re ready to act independently? They may find excuses to keep that probationary dynamic going indefinitely if you seem fine with it.

When employees hear that a CEO’s plan was thwarted by the board, they wonder who is really running the company. The same is true if the CEO starts every statement about strategy with, “The board wants us to… .” You’re not there to make friends or get a gold star for obeying orders; you are there to win. The board will sing your praises to the skies if the company hits all its targets under your leadership, even if you disregard their suggestions.

CEOs rarely push anywhere near the limits of their true power as commander-in-chief. Whether you feel ready or not, once you have the big job you might as well act like it. A good CEO will lead a board.

Good CEOs get comfortable asserting their authority. They’ve got plenty of it under the structures and customs of corporate life. Use it or lose it.