Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity: Summary & Key Insights

The first step in leading transformation is acknowledging the disease of complacency. Organizations rarely stall because the mission changes. They slow down because people lower their internal burn rate — the fire that once fueled their ambition begins to dim. In every company I’ve led, I’ve seen how comfort creeps in quietly. Teams start rationalizing delays, managers measure activity instead of outcomes, and meetings multiply while decisions stall. Complacency rarely announces itself; it hides behind polite consensus and overflowing calendars.

When I joined ServiceNow, I could sense it in the air — a company that had momentum but was beginning to believe that the ride would continue automatically. It won’t. Nothing sustains inertia better than past success. The first thing I do is force the organization to confront its reflection. That means looking hard at where we’ve lost sharpness — where we’ve started to confuse process for progress.

Diagnosing complacency also means studying culture. Does everyone still feel the urgency to win? Do we still celebrate results rather than effort? Growth stops when teams settle for comfort over clarity, politics over performance. My job as a leader is to break that trance. You cannot fix what you cannot admit, and the most dangerous belief in business is that stability equals success. The truth is almost always the opposite.

Raising expectations is not an HR exercise; it’s a cultural revolution. When I tell my teams we’re going to crank it up, I mean we’re setting standards that make mediocrity deeply uncomfortable. People perform to the level that’s expected of them, and most organizations inadvertently send the message that average is acceptable. I refuse to institutionalize average.

At Data Domain, when we competed against EMC and NetApp, we couldn’t afford to be average. We had to be better, sharper, faster. Every engineer, every salesperson knew that our margin for error was zero. That kind of pressure doesn’t destroy good people; it forges them. The moment a leader accepts that the status quo is fine, the whole organization exhales and energy dissipates.

Raising the bar means telling high performers they can do even more, and it means telling underperformers they need to step up or step out. Leaders must constantly calibrate teams to the highest achievable level. The paradox is this: when you hold people to a higher standard, they don’t resent it — they rise to meet it. It gives their work meaning. Excellence has gravity; people want to orbit around it.