Going from good to great requires paying attention to details and exceeding expectations, not just meeting them. It means relentlessly raising the bar on individual and team performance at all levels.Accepting mediocrity anywhere cripples an organization's competitiveness.

Raising the Bar on Performance

Most people won’t make an extraordinary effort. They’ll make an ordinary effort. The only competitive advantage comes from having people who will make an extraordinary effort.

<ul><li>Establish a simple, focused strategy and make it widely understood.</li><li>Set almost impossible goals to shock the system.</li><li>Do not spread resources too thin.</li><li>Make hard strategic choices to amplify strengths.</li><li>Bold strategies excite top talent.</li></ul>

Setting a Bold Strategy

Creating a high-performance culture requires leaders to set an intense pace and lead by example.The culture must align around key principles and values like customer focus, excellence, innovation, and teamwork.Culture is established early and hard to change later.

Instilling the Right Culture 

All efforts must align around strategy. Build streamlined, metrics-driven management systems to track progress. Stay close to the details of execution.Push for speed but not recklessness. Do not tolerate mediocre execution or excuses.

Executing Flawlessly 

<ul><li>Motivate the sales team through contests and incentives.</li><li>Set high aspirations and track results relentlessly.</li><li>Use metrics to drive sales behavior aligned with strategy.</li><li>Spend time coaching major deals.</li><li>Make sales a core competence, not an afterthought.</li></ul>

Amping up Sales Impact

Big marketing budgets are wasted without sustained programs to engage customers and promote differentiated positioning. Nurture target customer relationships. Promote thought leadership.Build programs around key strategies and messages.

Leveraging Marketing Programs

Build products that are not just incrementally better but fundamentally unique. Go beyond customer asks to delight them. Take risks on innovation but demand rigor.Ensure development priorities align tightly with strategy. Kill less differentiated products.

Developing Differentiated Products

Building a championship team is not about marquee names but rather people with drive, initiative, and a track record of outperformance.<ul><li>Skills can be taught, but the right attitude cannot.</li><li>Have high standards in hiring.</li><li>Let low performers go quickly.</li></ul>

Assembling the Right Team

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

The book Amp It Up by Frank Slootman shares leadership and management wisdom from his experience growing companies like Data Domain, ServiceNow and Snowflake. It provides advice on culture, talent, strategy, sales, marketing, product development and more. Slootman aims to help leaders ramp up performance.

Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller The secret to leading growth is your mindset Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time. Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model—and they don’t need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day. Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them. Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.

FRANK SLOOTMAN

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