How To Transform Your Organization For Maximum Growth And Scale

 

Amp It Up, by Frank Slootman, shows you how to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. 

Slootman, Snowflake CEO, declares 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,” explains Slootman. 

More specifically, Slootman says that to achieve unprecedented growth, leaders should: 

• declare war on mediocrity
• break the status quo
• make conflicted choices daily
• have a relentless focus on the mission 

“Make your organization mission driven,” says Slootman. “When your organization has a well-defined purpose, you feel it down in 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.” 

He adds that the more defined and intense the mission, the easier it will be for everyone to focus on it. 

And, once you have your mission in place, the four keys to getting everyone to embrace it and make it real are applying:

1. Focus
2. Urgency
3. Execution
4. Strategy

 Other key takeaways from the book for me include: 

• Worrying about your organization’s strategy before your team is good at executing is pointless. 
• 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. 
• 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. 
• Culture describes how people come together as a group on a day-to-day basis. Is yours respectful, fluid, engaging, constructive, demanding, urgent, creative? Or, is it dragging, political, CYA, risk avoiding, and confrontational? 
• Create a company culture where everybody, and that means everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function. Your company organization should run on influence, not rank and title. 
• Without focused leadership, millions of conflicting priorities compete with each other. Then the best people in the origination get frustrated and start to leave, as talent and energy go untapped and dormant. 

Amp It Up is ideal  for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds. 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.