Amp It Up and the Seduction of Intensity

The Stopwatch and the Mirror

Amp It Up, written by Frank Slootman (former Snowflake CEO, former ServiceNow CEO), became a bestseller shortly after it was published in 2022. Its very strong reviews (4.5 stars on Amazon at time of writing) reflect a book widely loved by executives. It is written to appeal to leaders under pressure, and offers them a decisive, clarifying, energizing path forward. It is easy to understand why this would be appealing.

This is a review of what Amp It Up licenses when read uncritically.

What the Book Argues

In Amp It Up, Slootman makes a straightforward argument: most organizations operate at a fraction of their potential, and leaders can dramatically accelerate performance by raising intensity across every dimension.

The core thesis is that “amping it up” means increasing pace, sharpening focus, and raising standards, simultaneously and relentlessly. Slootman asserts that mediocrity is the default state of organizations, and leaders must actively fight entropy by refusing to accept “good enough.”

The book advances four core arguments:

On pace: Most companies move too slowly because they confuse activity with progress. Slootman advocates compressing timelines aggressively. If someone says something will take a year, ask why it can’t be done in a quarter. Speed itself becomes a competitive advantage and cultural value.

On focus: Organizations dissipate energy across too many priorities. Slootman pushes for ruthless prioritization—identifying the one or two things that actually matter and saying no to everything else. He’s skeptical of consensus-driven decision-making, which he sees as producing lowest-common-denominator outcomes.

On standards: Leaders must be intolerant of underperformance and willing to make difficult personnel decisions quickly. The cost of inaction outweighs the cost of fixing a bad hire. Companies should engage in continuous “topgrading” - systematically upgrading talent.

On alignment: Strategy means nothing without execution alignment. Everyone needs to understand not just what they’re doing but why, with clear metrics and accountability.

The book is unapologetically intense. Slootman doesn’t soften his message for palatability. It’s essentially a manifesto for operational urgency over comfort.

Where Slootman is Right

Before criticizing Amp It Up, it’s worth acknowledging why it resonates, and why, in some contexts, it’s directionally correct.

Slootman’s core insight is that intensity is often underused as a leadership tool. Leaders hedge. They tolerate “good enough” instead of reaching for “great”. They allow timelines to stretch, standards to soften, and accountability to blur. Over time, that hesitation compounds into cultural rot. By the time leaders act, the organization has already normalized underperformance.

In companies where the problem really is complacency — where direction is broadly correct but execution energy has faded — raising urgency can be both clarifying and effective. Tight timelines force prioritization. High standards expose weak assumptions. Pressure reveals where the system is brittle and who can rise to the moment.

Seen this way, Amp It Up is a reaction against managerial passivity. It’s a call for leaders to stop negotiating with mediocrity and start acting like outcomes matter, because they do.

Diagnosis Assumed

The book assumes the hardest work of leadership, understanding what’s actually wrong, has already been done. Execution energy is the only missing variable. That assumption is rarely true and when it isn’t, urgency becomes actively harmful.

This is dangerous because when the problem at hand is misunderstood, urgency amplifies error. Execution pressure can easily collapse learning. Power bypasses evidence, and dissent gets interpreted as softness rather than a signal to introspect.

When faced with a significant challenge, every genuinely great leader begins by holding up a mirror.

Their self-interrogation asks “How have my actions contributed to this problem?” and “What signals might I be missing?”. Leaders do this not because they assume guilt, but because they understand that power creates asymmetric blind spots, and only they can correct for them. Amp It Up never asks leaders to hold up a mirror; it asks them to hold a stopwatch.

Catnip for Executives

Amp It Up is such catnip for senior leaders because it offers a simple, convenient story: If the company isn’t performing, it’s because the people doing the work aren’t intense enough.

The book feels good because it:

• Flatters leaders’ self-image as high-standards truth-tellers

• Frames underperformance as a failure of will, not understanding

• Turns urgency into a virtue independent of correctness

It offers a single-cause explanation for complex failure. That’s intoxicating to anyone under pressure, especially startup CEOs, because it collapses ambiguity into a simple lever: push harder.

This framing does three very convenient things:

1. Transfers all responsibility downward

2. Frames dissent as a character flaw

3. Redefines leadership as enforcement, not inquiry

The most revealing thing about this book is what it asks of leaders: almost nothing. Demand more, tolerate less. It does not ask leaders to interrogate their own models & perceptions, seek disconfirming evidence, or ask whether urgency is masking ignorance.

I’ve now seen multiple organizations where leaders, convinced intensity was the missing ingredient, bypassed evidence, overrode constraints, and used authority to force speed — only to discover too late that what they’d accelerated was the wrong thing. When leaders refuse to ask whether they might be wrong, urgency creates fragility rather than excellence.

The irony is that urgency doctrine is most seductive to leaders who are farthest from the work. A leader who is deeply embedded in the work rarely needs a book to remind them that speed matters; they feel it already.

A Brief Note on War

Amp It Up frequently borrows the language of war to describe business: enemies, campaigns, intensity, total commitment. I understand the rhetorical appeal, but business is not war, and pretending otherwise has consequences.

I was in Iraq during the surge. I know what urgency feels like when the stakes are actually life and death.

That experience left me with a deep skepticism of leaders who invoke wartime urgency without wartime stakes. War metaphors do conceptual work in this book. They normalize collateral damage, frame dissent as disloyalty, justify urgency at the expense of deliberation, and treat losses as acceptable if the “mission” continues.

That framing is deeply dangerous in a business context because the moral stakes are fundamentally different, but the human cost is still real. This brings us to the one respect where the analogy holds perfectly: the people who pay the price are almost never the ones making the call.

Accountability Flows Both Ways

Critics might conclude I’m arguing against accountability, urgency, or high standards. I’m not.

I’ve spent most of my career in environments where accountability was non-negotiable: missed numbers had consequences, bad decisions were visible, and outcomes mattered. I’ve seen what happens when leaders hesitate too long, tolerate drift, or confuse empathy with permissiveness. That failure mode is real — and damaging.

The question is not whether accountability matters.

The question is who it applies to first.

In any organization, accountability that flows in only one direction is not accountability at all. It’s pressure. Pressure without learning doesn’t produce excellence; it produces fear, gaming, and brittle execution.

True accountability starts with the people who have the most power and the least signal. Leaders are farther from the work by definition. Their models are necessarily more abstract. That makes them more likely, not less, to be wrong.

This is why every great leader I’ve worked with begins accountability by holding up a mirror.

They ask:

• What assumptions am I making?

• What evidence would tell me I’m wrong?

Only after that work do they turn urgency outward.

The Limits of a Phase-Specific Playbook

Slootman’s background is helpful context for interpreting the issues in this book. He arrived at ServiceNow in 2011, when the company was already growing rapidly with proven enterprise demand. The product worked, the market existed, but the machine needed tuning, not rethinking.

Snowflake is a similar story. He joined in 2019 after the core data warehousing product had demonstrated clear differentiation. The cloud data market was exploding. His job was to capture a wave already forming, not to figure out if there was a wave.

In both cases, he was brought in specifically because the strategic diagnosis was settled. The board had already decided “we have something, we need to scale it faster.” He’s essentially a specialist in a particular phase of company evolution: post-validation, pre-scale-ceiling.

This context doesn’t diminish what Slootman accomplished. Execution at that speed and scale is genuinely hard. If you’re a leader in that situation—proven model, clear market, execution clearly the bottleneck—this book may serve you well. It does, however, reframe the book’s applicability. He’s written a manual for a specific situation and marketed it as a general theory of leadership.

Urgency is a tool, not a theory of leadership. Leadership begins and ends with curiosity. Without it, intensity is little more than coercion.