Amp It Up

Picture this: you walk into a company where meetings drag on without conclusions, projects move at glacial pace, and people seem content with "good enough" results. Sound familiar? This scenario plays out in countless organizations where talented individuals work hard but somehow the collective energy feels flat, uninspiring, and far below potential.

What if I told you that transforming this dynamic doesn't require massive restructuring, expensive consultants, or wholesale personnel changes? The most powerful catalyst for organizational transformation lies in something much simpler yet profoundly impactful: dramatically raising your standards across every dimension of how you operate. When leaders consciously choose to amp up expectations, increase urgency, and elevate intensity, they unlock dormant potential that was always there, waiting to be activated.

Great companies aren't built on accepting mediocrity—they're forged by leaders who refuse to settle for anything less than excellence. Raising your standards means shifting from "that's not bad" to "that's insanely great," a phrase Steve Jobs used to separate transformative work from merely acceptable output.

Consider the transformation at Data Domain, where the leadership team established a simple but powerful test for every proposal. Instead of asking people what they thought of an idea, they asked if the team was thrilled with it, absolutely in love with it. Most responses revealed lukewarm enthusiasm—"It's okay" or "It's not bad." These responses became immediate signals to go back to the drawing board. The company cultivated a culture where people wouldn't bring forward anything unless they were bursting with excitement about it.

To implement this in your organization, start by establishing what "insanely great" looks like in your specific context. Challenge every presentation, every product feature, every process improvement with the simple question: "Are you thrilled with this?" Create space for honest assessment without penalty. When people admit something isn't exciting them, celebrate that honesty and redirect energy toward solutions that generate genuine enthusiasm.

When you consistently demand excellence rather than accepting adequacy, you create an environment where mediocrity feels uncomfortable and exceptional work becomes the natural expectation. This shift in standards becomes self-reinforcing, elevating performance across your entire organization.

True organizational power emerges when everyone pulls in the same direction with shared intensity and purpose. Alignment goes far beyond getting people to work together—it means creating seamless coordination where individual efforts amplify collective impact rather than working at cross-purposes.

At Snowflake, misalignment was costing millions. The sales team focused entirely on contract bookings because that's what drove their compensation, while the company only recognized revenue from actual consumption of services. This disconnect meant salespeople oversold capacity customers didn't need, leading to smaller renewals and commission costs that bore no relationship to actual revenue. The fundamental business model was sound, but internal systems were pulling in opposite directions.

The solution required restructuring incentives to match business reality. Sales compensation shifted to reward consumption rather than just contract size. Multi-year contracts became standard to balance customer needs with revenue recognition. Executive compensation aligned across all departments, ensuring everyone succeeded or failed together based on the same metrics. The transformation took several quarters but resulted in dramatically improved financial performance.

Start by mapping where your organization's incentives create conflicting priorities. Examine compensation structures, performance metrics, and decision-making processes to identify misalignments. Create shared metrics that connect individual success to organizational success. When people's personal wins directly correlate with company wins, you eliminate internal competition and channel all energy toward external success.

Remember that true alignment means abandoning individual optimization in favor of collective optimization. When achieved, it creates unstoppable momentum that competitors struggle to match.

Organizations often spread themselves across too many priorities, creating the illusion of busy productivity while actually moving like molasses through critical initiatives. The antidote to this diluted effort is ruthless prioritization combined with compressed cycle times that create urgency and momentum.

Focus means having the courage to say no to good opportunities so you can say yes to great ones. When ServiceNow's new chief product officer joined, he initially struggled to identify the single most important priority among countless pressing initiatives. Through focused dialogue, they identified one transformational goal: shifting from industrial user experience to consumer-grade service experience. This wasn't a quick project but a fundamental multi-year shift requiring sustained organizational commitment and resources.

Begin by asking yourself and your team a challenging question: if you could only accomplish one thing for the rest of the year, what would it be and why? This exercise forces clarity about what really matters versus what merely seems urgent. Once you've identified your top priority, examine everything else through the lens of how it supports or detracts from that singular focus.

Simultaneously, compress your cycle times. When people ask for a week to complete something, ask why it can't be done tomorrow or the next day. Challenge every timeline and deadline. Create an environment where speed becomes a competitive advantage rather than an afterthought. This isn't about creating stress—it's about eliminating waste and bureaucracy that slows down decision-making and execution.

Sharp focus combined with accelerated pace creates a powerful momentum that energizes high performers while naturally filtering out those who prefer more leisurely approaches to work.

While execution provides the foundation, strategic transformation creates the multiplier effect that separates good companies from industry-defining ones. This means constantly expanding your aperture of opportunity while staying grounded in operational excellence.

ServiceNow began as a helpdesk management tool but leadership recognized early signals that customers were using it for completely different purposes. Human resources departments, security teams, and other service domains found value in the platform. Rather than defending the narrow market definition, leadership embraced expansion into what they called "global business services"—a single digital platform serving all service domains across organizations.

The transformation required courage to move beyond comfortable market definitions. They launched multiple business units pursuing different service areas, expecting some to fail but betting that enough would succeed to justify the investment. All of them succeeded, creating a business with multiple growth engines rather than a single point of vulnerability.

To apply this thinking, regularly examine how your customers use your products or services in unexpected ways. Look for patterns that suggest broader applicability than your current market positioning. Develop peripheral vision that spots opportunities before they become obvious to competitors. Create small experiments to test adjacent markets without betting the entire company on unproven concepts.

Strategic transformation requires balancing confidence in your core capabilities with honest assessment of market evolution. The companies that successfully navigate this balance create sustainable competitive advantages that compound over time rather than diminish.

Leadership that creates transformational change requires a unique combination of ambitious vision and disciplined execution. Amped-up leaders don't just manage existing systems—they actively reshape organizational DNA to unlock potential that others miss entirely.

The journey from average to exceptional leadership often involves learning to make decisions with incomplete information and taking responsibility for outcomes regardless of external circumstances. Frank Slootman's evolution from a careful, consensus-building young manager to a decisive, high-velocity leader illustrates this transformation. Early in his career, he would hesitate and try to fix underperforming people or products rather than making clean decisions. Experience taught him that extended deliberation often just postponed inevitable conclusions while consuming precious time and energy.

Develop your capacity to quickly assess situations and act decisively. Practice identifying the core issues that matter most while filtering out noise and distractions. Build comfort with being occasionally wrong rather than consistently slow. Create feedback loops that help you calibrate your judgment over time without becoming paralyzed by uncertainty.

Most importantly, take ownership of outcomes rather than circumstances. External factors will always create challenges, but amped-up leaders find ways to succeed despite unfavorable conditions. They create energy and momentum that attracts high-performing people while repelling those who prefer to coast on existing momentum.

The goal isn't perfection—it's developing the capability to consistently elevate performance across every dimension of your influence. When leaders model this behavior consistently, it becomes contagious throughout the organization.

Organizations everywhere possess untapped potential waiting to be unlocked through leadership that refuses to accept the status quo. The five principles of amping up—raising standards, aligning people, sharpening focus, accelerating pace, and transforming strategy—create a multiplier effect that generates extraordinary results from ordinary circumstances.

As Slootman observed, "Being on a mission is a visceral experience, not merely an intellectual one." When people feel connected to something larger than themselves and see their daily work contributing to meaningful outcomes, they naturally elevate their performance beyond what seemed possible. This transformation doesn't require changing your people—it requires changing your expectations and creating systems that make excellence the easiest path forward.

Start immediately with one specific area where you can raise standards without apology. Whether it's the quality of presentations in meetings, the speed of decision-making, or the clarity of communication, pick something tangible and begin modeling the elevated expectation you want to see throughout your organization. Once people experience what "amped up" feels like, they rarely want to return to previous levels of mediocrity.