Business Is Not War

I read Frank Slootman's Amp It Up recently, and it clarified my thinking about management philosophy, even though I landed somewhere different from where the book wanted to take me. Slootman's thesis is something like: increase the urgency and demand more from everyone. Cal Newport's Slow Productivity argues the opposite: do fewer things and obsess over quality. I think one of these approaches is more honest about how good work actually happens, and it is not the one with war metaphors.

Slootman says, without apparent irony, "It's no exaggeration to say that business is war." This is literally an exaggeration. And it's a useful focal point for everything I find problematic with the book. The war metaphor treats employees as soldiers, competitors as enemies, and market share as territory. It frames business as a zero-sum game when most of it is not. Economics has understood this since at least Adam Smith, that most market transactions grow the pie rather than divide it. Slootman's war framing assumes that every gain requires someone else's loss, and that is just not how most business works.

Slootman's core framework has five parts: raise standards, align people, sharpen focus, pick up the pace, transform strategy. All of these ideas are genuinely useful. The section on focus is particularly solid. "Priority" should be a singular word; when you have many priorities you have none. Ask "what are we not going to do?" and "if you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, what would it be?" These are good questions. Most leaders would benefit from asking them more often.

And the emphasis on high standards is something I appreciate and agree with fully. This is where the two philosophies actually converge. Newport's "obsess over quality" and Slootman's "raise your standards" are pointing at the same thing. Holding people to a high bar and being willing to have difficult conversations about performance are all part of good management. I have held those kinds of conversations and they mattered. Where the two approaches diverge is on how you get there. Slootman's answer is urgency. When someone says they'll get back to you in a week, ask them why not tomorrow. This sounds productive in a book, but in practice, it creates an environment where people are always behind, always feeling the heat, never able to think at the depth that good engineering requires. Higher urgency leads to burnout.

Newport makes the opposite case and I find it far more convincing. Slow Productivity rests on three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. The argument is that the most meaningful work in history was not produced under artificial urgency. It was produced by people who had the space to think deeply about fewer problems. The claim is not that we should all move slowly for the sake of it, but that sustained focus on fewer things at higher quality produces better results than spreading attention thin and racing to meet arbitrary deadlines.

As an engineering manager, this matches what I see in practice. The best work my team produces comes from periods of focus, not pushes of intensity. When people have the space to think carefully about a problem, they build things that hold up. When they are rushed, they ship something that passes review but needs to be revisited in three months. The urgency model optimizes for visible activity. The slow productivity model optimizes for outcomes.

I also find myself uncomfortable with the worldview underneath Slootman's framework. The book assumes that work is the central project of your life. I do not share that assumption. I care about leading my team well and I care about creating real value in what we build. But work is one part of a life, and a management philosophy that only functions for people who have made it their whole thing has a limited audience. The "quiet quitting" discourse during the pandemic revealed how many workers already felt this way but had no language for it. The phrase was misleading because most of them were not quitting anything. They were just drawing a boundary that Slootman's philosophy does not allow for.

Where these two philosophies genuinely diverge is on what they ask of people. Slootman's model asks people to run hotter. Newport's asks them to run deeper. One treats intensity as a virtue. The other treats it as a cost, one that compounds over time and eventually degrades the quality of the work it was supposed to improve. I know which approach I want to bring to the teams I lead.