B Players

From Frank Slootman’s “Amp It Up!” essay (LinkedIn, 2018), the seed of his 2022 book of the same name. Slootman led Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake.

Most companies worry about their worst performers. Slootman’s claim is that this is the wrong worry. C players, in his diagnosis, are visible: everyone on the team already knows who they are, and the system eventually catches up. The B players are the actual threat because they are competent enough to stay and numerous enough to set the tone. He calls them “the ultimate passengers”: not bad enough to fire, not good enough to keep. They drag the average down quietly. The remedy is to raise the bar until B players have to choose: become A players, or become C players and exit.

The diagnosis is the operationally useful half. Almost every team has the urge to handle a clear C player; almost no team has the discipline to confront a B player who hits their numbers and adds nothing else.