 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know what you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight in mediocrity every step of the way, amp it up, and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slutman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called Amp It Up, leading for hypergrowth by raising expectations, increasing urgency, and elevating intensity. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times, and if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slutman himself, from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slutman was, why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slutman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic and I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. Denise, our CMO, she just made sure that this process wasn't gonna, it was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and all the crap they actually write in the book. They say, oh, I'm not doing another couple of tests. Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slutman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not gonna go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself, but Slutman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNeely, Jay Shree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years and each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slutman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a breaking analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slutman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and Service Now, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook, if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, I don't use playbooks, I'm a situational leader. Playbooks, you know, they work in football games, but in the military, they teach you situational leadership. Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know, as opposed to getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before and then how would you deal with this? And I really try to force myself into, I've never seen this before. And how do I think about it? Because at least the very different interpretations and be able to mind it just really avoid the rinse-and-repeat mentality and the abrupt people that have worked with me before, some of them got with me from company to company, they would have fallen prey to rinse-and-repeat. I would literally go like, it's not what we want. So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past. Put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind. Essentially start over. Now that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slutman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, what type of CEO are you? He says, do we have to put a label on it? It really depends on the situation. Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers want it. He says in his book, in companies, there are passengers and our drivers, we want drivers. He said, you have to figure out really quickly who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people off the bus. Keep the right people, bring in new people that fit the culture and put them in the right seats on the bus. Now, these are not easy decisions to make, but as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie Moneyball. Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland A's, he refused to play Scott Hatterberg at First Base. So the GM, Billy Bean, played by Brad Pitt, says to Peter Brand, who was played by Jonah Hill, you have to fire Carlos Peña. Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, just keep it quick. Tell him he's been traded and that's it. So I asked Frank, okay, I get it. Like the movie, when you have the wrong person on the bus, you just have to make the decision, be straightforward and do it. But I asked him, what if you're on the fence? What if you're not completely sure if this person is a driver or a passenger? If he or she should be on the bus or not on the bus, how do you handle that? Listen to what he said. I have a very simple way to break ties and when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slutman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. Back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take them out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slutman, but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh, but that's how Slutman approaches it, very Belicheckian, if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slutman takes? We got into this conversation with the discussion about MBOs management by objective. Slutman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said, it's no flake, everyone gets paid the same way from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization by creating alignment, urgency and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slutman says, as the organization gets bigger, but if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following, play the clip. Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, it's an opportunity to end things on. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? And according to Slutman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's coming on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy, it becomes fun, everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting, they're inspiring, and it becomes addictive. Now, let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that, really, he said. I said, yeah, I mean, it was an easy read, but uncomfortable because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, not tens of thousands, but thousands, enough to have to take this stuff very seriously. And I found myself throughout the book, on the one hand, saying to myself, oh, I got that right, good job, Dave. And then other times I was thinking to myself, oh, wow, I probably need to rethink that, I need to amp it up on that front. And the point is, to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slutman challenged the reader if you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who could take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions, but Slutman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me, it doesn't really make you think. You know, a lot of words and stuff and I've got a lot of questions for you here. And there's like 15 things, there are areas for you. I'm like, you're 15, you got none, right? It's like, you just can't decide what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. The thing is, it's very hard to just say one thing but it's really the mental exercise that matters. Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slutman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slutman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says, and he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation, according to Slutman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slutman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote Amp It Up. In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. One of my prior bosses at Gelsinger when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, that's not what he was telling me. And he called Andy Grove the same because he was the same time he was in command. And he said no strategy is better than his execution, which I find one of the most brilliant techniques. Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slutman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slutman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slutman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of Salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led, which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slutman in his own words, talk about the customer success department. I view the whole company as a customer success function, okay? I'm customer success, you know? I said in my presentation yesterday, we're a customer first organization. I'm leading the department. Now he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slutman also has always been a big, has always been big on net promoter score NPS. And Snowflakes is very high at 72. And according to Slutman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now Slutman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a t-shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, oh, what do you think? And she said, well, it's okay. So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're gonna do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Hip it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slutman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. He was incredibly tall of anything that didn't, or he didn't think it was great. He was immediately dumb with it and with the person. I'm not that aggressive in that way. I'm a little bit nicer about it, but I still, I don't want to give in to expediency and mediocrity, I just don't. I'm just gonna fight every step of the way. Now, that story was about a little thing, like some swag, but Slutman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go to market around industries like financial services, media and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends, but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep as curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystem as well in my view. Slupan even said, he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat, but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slupan's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation there's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation and I will as the opportunity arises. But for now I'll just give you the kind of bumper stick and revamp it up. Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching and thank you to Alex Meyerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for breaking analysis. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters and Rob Hoef is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.volante at siliconangle.com or DM me at dvolante or comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. We'll see you next time on breaking analysis.