Qubit: Frank Slootman (Snowflake) on Focus
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman emphasized the following on the What Got You There podcast:
If everything is a priority, then nothing is
Clarify what’s most important to you
Focus your resources on that and you’ll move mountains
Easy to say but impossible for many to do.
“Well, that’s hard and that’s the whole point of it. A laser can cut through steel, why? Because of focus whereas if you diffuse the light, it does nothing. There’s a simple concept. If you’re a mile wide and an inch deep, you’re going to be swimming in molasses. Certainly, it is the most awful sensation when you’re just not making headway. And that happens because we’re spread too thin. It’s human nature, by the way, to keep adding things, I always try to take things off people’s plates or I try to sequence it. In other words, let’s do this first and this last. I’m not taking it off your plate, but I’m changing the order.
The question I always ask is, I say, look, let’s do an exercise here. If you could do only one thing for the rest of this year, let’s say it’s mid-year, if you could only do one thing, what would it be and why? Talk me through the what and the why. Most people never ask that question, but it’s really important because then you know how to amass your resources behind one thing. The impact is going to be far greater than when you’re amassing the resources behind five things or 10 things. I’ve been in numerous meetings with other CEOs and board meetings and they put their priorities up and there’s like 15 of them.
You have none when you have 15. So you got to bring that back to what is the one thing, not because you only will be doing one thing, but it starts to clarify what is important here. If you get that wrong, then basically you’re wasting and diluting and misdirecting the resources of the enterprise. That’s what you’re doing. And your job is to do exactly not that. You have to focus the resources the right way, then you can move mountains.”
Source:
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman Leading for Hypergrowth
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