A Nsense of Urgency

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A Sense of Urgency

(John P. Kotter /Harvard Business School Press /

September 2008/128 Pages /$22.00)



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A Sense of Urgency

MAIN IDEA

Urgency is a gut level determination to move and win – to make the right things happen

today. Until and unless an organization creates a high enough sense of urgency

amongst a large enough group of people, it will flounder. When that sense of urgency

exists, even organizations which are facing formidable obstacles can and will produce

solid results.

To achieve more, raise the level of urgency which exists inside your organization. You

do this by winning the hearts and the hearts of your people. Bulk up and enhance yoururgency level and all kinds of good things will result.

“Creating a high enough sense of urgency among a large enough group of people is an

issue I have come to believe is of overriding importance in a fast-moving, turbulent era.

When the urgency challenge is not handled well, even very capable people and

resource-rich organizations can suffer greatly. When the challenge is handled well, even

those who face formidable obstacles can produce results we all want for our careers,

employers and nations. Put simply, a strong sense of urgency is moving from an

essential element in big change programs to an essential asset in general.”

– John Kotter

About of Author

JOHN KOTTER is an emeritus professor of leadership at Harvard Business School. He

specializes in issues of corporate leadership and change. He has published eighteen

books including Leading Change, The Heart of Change and Our Iceberg is Melting.

Dr.Kotter, a graduate of MIT and Harvard, has received a number of awards for

business leadership and graduate business school curriculum design.

Dr. Kotter’s Web site is at www.johnkotter.com



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In business, all the good stuff that happens begins because a sense of urgency exists.When people within an organization have a true sense of urgency, they think action isneeded now rather than when it can be fitted more easily into a schedule. A sense ofurgency compels people to try and make some solid progress every day rather thanwhen they get around to it. Urgency is a gut-level determination to move forward and towin right here right now.

When an organization has a genuine sense of urgency:

1. Everyone starts looking for immediate opportunities to make a difference and forways to get ahead.2. People start to identify what the critical issues are and come forward to get involved inimplementing those needed changes.3. Leaders work hard to come up with viable strategies for tackling high-value issues.4. All the teams which get formed will relentlessly communicate their visions andstrategies so as to generate buy-in from the rest of the organization.

5. People will feel empowered and committed to removing obstacles which hold theorganization back.6. There will be an overwhelming desire to achieve some quick wins in order to disarmcritics and cynics.7. Everyone will refuse to let the organization slide back into its business-as-usualhabits.8. There will be an ongoing desire to graft all necessary changes into the systems andculture of the organization moving forward.

In all, the advantages of urgency are clear, obvious and compelling. Lots of good thingshappen when urgency is present and loads of opportunities to grow will get passed overwhen urgency is missing.



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This is noteworthy because urgency in companies is actually quite rare. It’s uncommonfor a sense of urgency to be there all the time. It generally has to be created and thenrecreated periodically, Otherwise, business-as-usual tends to reign supreme.

When people have a sense of urgency:

■ They are proactive in doing things which will meet present challenges or position foremerging opportunities.■ They look for ways to launch smart projects and initiatives which will move theorganization forward.■ They tend to be both focused and motivated.■ They are invigorated by what they’re doing rather than

becoming prone to burnout or other problems. The opposite of a sense of urgency iscomplacency – people are content with the status quo and are unwilling to pay anyattention to anything which is beyond the scope of their present set of activities. People

who are complacent won’t look at new opportunities, even if they are wonderful. Internalcomplacency can create a disaster scenario for any organization when the marketplacechanges quickly.

There is also such a thing as a “false sense of urgency”. Most frequently, this will becharacterized by lots of energetic-looking activity which looks good on the surface butproduces no genuine forward movement at the end of the day. This kind of behaviortends to be driven by the pressures that fuel anxiety or sometimes anger – people aredoing things because they feel that’s the right thing to do. A false sense of urgency isdangerous because it can drain the organization of its energy. Everyone gets so busydoing all kinds of activities that nobody steps back and asks whether those activities are,in fact, generating the results which are required.

A sense of urgency is not supported by an adrenalin rush. It has nothing to do withsitting through meeting after meeting. Instead, true urgency focuses on critical issues.The driving motivation for true urgency is a determination to win rather than anxietyabout losing or a desire to keep up appearances. When you have a bona fide sense ofurgency, you set out to try and accomplish something important every day. You focus ondoing what’s important rather than anything and everything which comes to mind.



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The warning signals you might be dealing with a situation which involves complacencyor a false sense of urgency are:

■ Rather than saying “We have to deal with this situation as fast as possible to position

ourselves for the future”, the senior management team talks to consulting firms andsolicits proposals from them.■ When a consultant finally gets appointed, it takes them about a year to come up with adraft of a new strategy for your firm. This new strategy is developed by the consultantwith only limited input from those who will have hands-on involvement. Despite that, theCEO and the board of directors like it and feel confident this is the way forward out ofthe morass the firm is currently bogged down in.■ A task force is chosen to roll out the new strategy and put the firm back on a soundfooting. Tellingly, the CEO is not a member of the task force.■ It takes the new task force about a month to hold its first planning meeting becauseeveryone is busy.■ When the task force gets together, nobody is certain what the suggested new strategy

actually is. Nobody has had the time to read and understand the 100-plus-pagedocument the consultants generated in order to justify their fees.■ It takes another four weeks for the task force to meet again because everyone hasprior commitments.■ Everyone at the second meeting agrees the firm’s competitive position is gettingworse. There is widespread discussion about who is to blame but no agreement onwhat, if anything, to do about it.■ At the third meeting of the task force, it is decided to form a sub committee who will beresponsible for communicating the new strategy to the rest of the firm. It has takenaround six months to get to this position.■ Frustrated by the lack of progress, the CEO starts sitting on the task force meetings.This makes everyone nervous and a flurry of projects get launched. The vice president

of sales ends up giving a sixty-slide PowerPoint presentation which concludes the



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problems are all in product development. This sets off a frenzy of activity in productdevelopment. None of this activity is dedicated to understanding what customers want,building better products or responding to the competition. Instead, product developmentgets busy trying to defend its own turf as aggressively as possible.

Obviously, the scenario just detailed is something of a nightmare created by too muchcomplacency and false urgency. If there had been a true sense of urgency, everythingprobably would have played out quite differently:

■ The senior management team would have felt compelled to focus on the key strategicissues themselves rather than delegating this to outside consultants.■ Once problems were clarified, the senior management team would have become thetask force to bring about needed changes.■ Everyone would have cancelled their other appointments so they could focus on thegreatest priority task facing the firm as soon as possible.■ At the first meeting of the task force, the CEO would stand and say: “We are in an

unsustainable position at present. It’s clear we need to change both the productdevelopment and selling processes. We can’t delay making changes any longer. Let’sdiscuss how we can use this challenge as an opportunity to leapfrog all our competitorsand get into a strong position for the future. And let’s table some suggested projects wecan get started immediately to move in the right direction”.■ The ideas made at the first meeting would start to happen

even before the second meeting took place a week later. In other words, a genuinesense of urgency can have a huge impact. At a practical level, it can mean thedifference between wasting time on departments shooting at each other and everyonecollaborating to come up with the best way for the firm to move forward in the future. Agenuine sense of urgency can be immensely constructive whereas a false sense ofurgency can be equally destructive.

“Very, very smart people can be astonishingly complacent in the face of needed change.

There are many reasons, and none more important than historical success. Withsufficient success, the threats from outside are, or once were conquered. With no needto focus outward, eyes shift inward to manage a larger and larger organization.Competitive instincts can also easily turn inward, creating bureaucratic politics. As aresult, new problems or opportunities in the outside world are not seen clearly, if at all.Complacency grows, leading to even less interest in or focus on outside reality, leadingto still more complacency”.

– John Kotter

“ At the very beginning of any effort to make changes of any magnitude, if a sense of

urgency is not high enough and complacency is not low enough, everything elsebecomes so much more difficult”.

– John Kotter

“With a false sense of urgency, an organization does have a great deal of energized

action, but it’s driven by anxiety, anger, and frustration, and not a focused determinationto win, and win as soon as is reasonably possible. With false urgency, the action has afrantic feeling: running from meeting to meeting, producing volumes of paper, movingrapidly in circles, all with a dysfunctional orientation that often prevents people fromexploiting key opportunities and addressing gnawing problems. Mistaking what youmight call false urgency from real urgency is a huge problem today. People constantly



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see the frenziedaction, assume that it represents true urgency, and then move ahead,only to encounter problems and failures not unlike what would happen if they weresurrounded by complacency”.

– John Kotter

A genuine sense of urgency is created only when people buy-in with both their headsand their hearts. It can never be generated by a fact-filled business case alone becausethat approach caters only to the intellectual side of the brain. People need to feel theneed for change before anything worthwhilewillhappen.

“Underlying a true sense of urgency is a set of feelings: a compulsive determination to

move, and win, now. When it comes to affecting behavior, feelings are more influentialthan thoughts. This is a perspective that is rarely acknowledged in the classroom or theboardroom. For centuries, we have had the expression in English, ‘Great leaders winover the hearts and minds of others’. The expression is not, ‘Great leaders win over theminds of others’. More interesting yet, the expression is not that great leaders win theminds and hearts of others. Heart comes first”.



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– John Kotter

Winning over the head with logical facts is important but by itself all this generallyproduces is a flurry of nonproductive behavior. To generate a true sense of urgency, you

have to provide an experience that is very much aimed at the heart. The determinationto move and to win now comes when goals are discussed which are analytically soundbut are also equally ambitious in their scope to help people do things which aremeaningful and exhilarating.

Tactics which succeed in aiming at the heart have five general characteristics:

1. They are thoughtfully created human experiences rather than a collection of facts andfigures.2. They appeal to all the senses.3. They are credible because they are linked to action and not just more talk.4. They are felt rather than explicitly explainable.

5. They lead us to raise our sights and to emotionally embrace new goals outside thestatus quo.

To create a genuine sense of urgency by appealing to both the head and the heart,there are four general tactics which you can and should use: Find ways to bring theoutside in Instead of merely assembling data and dumping it on people, find effective

ways to inject some of the outside realities of the marketplace into groups that are tooinwardly focused. By doing this, you allow everyone to realign their internal conditionswith the opportunities and hazards which exist in the real world of customers.

It’s very easy for an organization to be inwardlyfocused. There is a natural tendencytowards internal focus. To reduce the gap between what’s happening on the outside andwhat people see and feel inside your organization, there are several ideas to try:

■ Talk about the inside-outside problem – make everyone aware having an internal



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focus can be a big problem. Past successes can mean a “we know best” culture resultsespecially if you work for a large organization. Explain to everyone an internal focusmight mean you miss the subtle warningsigns of new opportunities and hazards andtherefore everyone should seek outside information about threats and opportunities on

an ongoing basis.

■ Listen to your employees who interact with customers – enshrine them as expertsbecause they are face-to-face with customers every day. Make it easy for information toflow from these people to decision makers, even if you’re talking about entry-levelemployees. Ask them questions all the time and listen carefully to what they say.

■ Create videos about your customers that you can show internally – the problems theyare having with your products and the creative waysthey are using what you sell them. Ifyou can show people what’s really happening, this can have a dramatic impact on whatpeople do.

■ When you learn of problems, broadcast what you’ve uncovered the length andbreadth of your organization – don’t try and sweep problems under the carpet. Trustevery single individual in your organization to contribute to the solutions which areneeded. Don’t assume only senior managers can solve problems.

■ Redecorate – put pictures of your customers on your walls and change them eachweek if possible. Make your workplace incredibly informative and keep things fresh bychanging your visuals on a regular basis.

■ Send your own people out – have your employees go out and see what’s happeningand then report back. Have them find out what your customers like, what they hate andwhat needs to change. Create a forum where these customer stories can be shared witheveryone else.

■ Bring other people in – external experts, customers, academics, suppliers, consultants,keynote speakers, etc. Create an atmosphere where everyone craves information andis trying to learn. That can be incredibly helpful.

• Bring in relevant data and present it in an eye-catching manner – aggregate the data inways that are clear, visually appealing and easy to absorb. Make sure your data is:• Deep enough to be useful and accurate.• Packaged so it can be read in 10 minutes at most.• Surprising and/or dramatic.

• Interesting and useful at all levels of your organization.

By all means use good judgement so you don’t end up creating a false sense of urgencythis way. Remember you’re trying to build a gut-level determination to move and winright now rather than generating anger, frustration and anxiety.

A sense of urgency always flows from the top of the organization down. The boss has tomodel urgency constantly before anyone else will take any notice or feel any sense ofurgency themselves.



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This is a case where what the boss does is far more important than what he or shemerely says.

The two things which dissipate a sense of urgency are obvious and well-known:

■ Clutter undermines a sense of urgency. If you’re too busy doing low-value items, youwill have no time to move fast. You won’t have any agility because your day will alreadybe so full of meetings there is no time to get anything done from one meeting to the next.If you cull out low-priority items, you’ll create time for doing the more important stuff. Andremember, if you delegate and purge, that will automatically give everyone else

permission to do the same themselves. Also watch out that other people who report toyou are not in the habit of delegating their problems up to you and thereby crowdingyour schedule excessively.

■ Fatigue similarly undermines a sense of urgency. If you’re dog tired all the time, youwon’t feel like engaging in the impromptu interactions which generally push thingsforward better than any formal meeting ever does. If you’re jaded, you won’t be keen toexplore the marketplace environment looking for new clues and hints. Instead, you’llmerely go through the actions, sit in meeting after meeting and so forth. Under theseconditions, it’s easy to end up with a words-deeds mismatch – where everyone in theorganization takes what you say with a grain of salt because they know you never followthrough on what you’re suggesting. Instead, next week will be another repeat of thesame old thing.

It’s an interesting fact that in most organizations, urgency begets urgency. If otherpeople see you acting with a sense of urgency, they will feel motivated to do the same.To become more visibly urgent:

■ Become an expert at purging and delegating – get all those low-priority items anddistracting projects off your appointment diary. Let other people do what they were hiredto do without any hand holding from you.

■ Move with deliberate speed on everything you do – use the time you free up to return

calls promptly and get back to people. Never end a meeting without clarifying who willdo what and when. Write down these understandings and follow through so peoplebecome confident you’re genuinely in the game.

■ When you speak with people, inject some passion – talk about the need to moveforward and adapt to the marketplace all the time. Stress this is the only way to stayahead of competitors. Talk about stories that illustrate what you’re suggesting. Beinfective and spark a sense of urgency in others.

■ Match what you say and what you do – don’t just talk about the world outside, live it.Uncover some exciting new opportunities first-hand. Follow through on whatever yousay and make good things happen.



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■ Be highly visible – let others see your urgency as this will encourage them to act thesame way. Ask a trusted colleague to look at what you’re doing and give you somefeedback whether you are encouraging or discouraging a sense of urgency. Be ashining example of how you want others to act.

“ All of us send messages constantly. What we say is obviously important. How, when,

and where we speak can be even more revealing. People watch how quickly we moveon various issues. They notice tone of voice, facial and body movements. They noticedetails, if only unconsciously, like whether we start meetings on time. The implicationsfor creating a sense of urgency, or not, follow directly”.

– John Kotter

“Behaving urgently to help create great twenty-first-century organizations demands

patience, too, because great accomplishments – not just the activity associated withfalse urgency – can require years. The right attitude might be called ‘urgent patience’.That might sound like a self-contradictory term. It’s not. It means acting each day with asense of urgency but having a realistic view of time. It means recognizing that five yearsmay be needed to attain important and ambitious goals, and yet coming to work eachday committed to finding every opportunity to make progress towards those goals.‘Urgent patience’ captures in two words a feeling and set of actions that are never seenwith a false sense of urgency”.

– John Kotter

“Once you understand the basic idea of how people act to increase a sense of urgency

in others, it’s relatively easy to see how the method can be applied in any situation. Thetactic is simple. Look at all you do. Ask a trusted aide or colleague to look at all you do.Does your behavior make others feel a true sense of urgency around key issues? Are

your actions modeling what you need from others. Do your words match your deeds?The odds are high that you have not been taught to behave the way you now need tobehave. Why can’t you learn? Why not start today?”

– John Kotter

Neither one of these perspectives is completely correct in and of itself. Both



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perspectives have some merit. Over time, it isn’t unusual for an organization’s controlsystems to get progressively more heavy handed with the result they eventually kill theentrepreneurial spark and make change difficult. From that perspective, a periodic crisismight not be a bad idea because it’s a chance to clean house to some degree.

If you’re not careful, though, a crisis can generate only a false sense of urgency – aflurry of activity accompanied by anxiety and anger. That’s not really all that helpful.Ideally, what you want a crisis to do is to generate a genuine sense of urgency. You wantthe message to go out: “We have to act, and act quickly. Blaming others iscounterproductive and will get us nowhere. If we’re smart, we can use this crisis toposition ourselves to be even stronger in the future. You can guarantee there will beeven more turbulence in the markets in the future.”

In fact the advantages of a periodic crisis are actually so attractive some thought mustbe given to whether or not it would be helpful to create a crisis yourself now and then.Doing this would allow you to develop a new strategy and get it into action with

immediate effect rather than waiting until you are forced to act. If you do this with blindenthusiasm, a stage-managed crisis would not be helpful but if this is approached in a judicious way, a manufactured crisis may end up being exceptionally helpful.

There are four potential problems that can arise whenyou decide to use a crisis toreduce complacency and increase urgency:

1. You cannot automatically assume people will feel the need to act differently when thecrisis comes along – because some will still revert to anger, fear and confusionregardless. Sometimes a crisis persuades people to make fewer decisions rather thanbetter decisions. Advance planning and action plans are needed to make sure peopleget mobilized by a crisis rather than paralyzed.

2. Sometimes, there will be an angry backlash to a manufactured crisis – people will feelmanipulated rather than energized. You might inadvertently make matters worse andgenerate only anger rather than a steely determination to move forward and win.Everyone else might spend so much time looking for someone else to blame they neverget around to doing the good stuff that’s required.

3. If you passively sit and wait, a crisis might never come –orat the very least themarketplace might evolve much slower than you would hope. The crisis situation whichwould jolt everyone out of their normal complacency might not arrive as scheduled forall kinds of different reasons and rationales.

4. The crisis when it does arrive may actually end up being much more severe thananticipated – instead of merely shaking things up in a useful way, the crisis may put youout of business altogether.

The bottom line is you shouldn’t be naive. A crisis certainly can and should be used asan opportunity to move forward but underestimate the impact of a crisis at your own risk.To harness a crisis to create a true sense of urgency:

■ Keep a positive outlook – look for potential opportunities which may be well disguisedas dreadful problems.■ Don’t assume a crisis will automatically reduce complacency

– but keep your eye on the ball and make sure everyone is aware of what’s going down.



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■ Make your crisis visible, unambiguous and significant –so everyone knows it can’t besolved by business-as-usual. Never minimize the bad news which comes.■ Be proactive – get everyone involved in developing action plans and thenimplementing what needs to be done.

■ Remember you have to appeal to the hearts as well as the minds of your people – sodon’t merely look at the situation analytically. Inject some passion, conviction, optimismand determination into your plans.■ Bring the outside in when urgency levels are low – get busy trying to solve yourproblems every day.■ Take care if you are considering creating your own crisis – make sure it doesn’t get outof control and end up putting you out of business altogether. People hate beingmanipulated so don’t do it lightly.■ Enlist allies – get senior managers and others on your side who see how a crisis canbe used as a growth opportunity. Get someone with a bit of sway to take the lead.■ Be prudent and smart.

“Urgency will, in all probability, become more relevant in the foreseeable future becauseof the changes swirling around us. Not only is the world hitting us with new opportunitiesand hazards, but it is doing so in many arenas at an accelerating rate. Intensity ofcompetition, technological breakthroughs, continuing globalization, and the increasingneed for innovation all feed this rate acceleration. The specifics will vary from industry toindustry, across different levels of government, and in different countries. But theimplications are always the same. Those who feel content with the status quo – feelbeing the key word, not what they necessarily say – put themselves in a more and moredangerous position. The anxious and angry focus on the wrong issues, often waste timein a flurry of unneeded activities, all with the same consequence–agrowing vulnerability.Those with the compulsive drive to move, and win, now – feelings associated with a truesense of urgency – position themselves to achieve more than seems logical orreasonable for themselves, their employers, and the world in which we all live”.

– John Kotter

“Speed will only increase. A sense of urgency will only become more essential. Do we

have a strong sense of urgency to deal with issues? Action is the test. Never forget,furious activity and running and meeting and slick presentation are not a sign of trueurgency. Alertness, movement, and leadership, now – and from many people, not a few – are the signs of true urgency”.

– John Kotter

Naysayers in any organization can stop attempts to create a sense of urgency dead inits tracks. Every organization has them. They are always armed with a list of tenreasons why the current situation is fine with them. Naysayers will openly insist ongathering more data before a decision should be made. They excel at creating feelingsof fear and anxiety which can paralyze anything and everything.

Naysayers are a different breed from skeptics. Once you win skeptics over andconvince them their initial opinions are wrong, they often end up becoming the new

initiative’s biggest champion. Naysayers won’t ever budge and they take delight inderailing any process which is intended to create change.



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The other differences between naysayers and skeptics are:

When you identify a naysayer:

■ Don’t bother trying to co-opt them to your team – because it can’t be done. All you’llend up doing is wasting your valuable time. Regardless of what the facts say or whateveryone else thinks, naysayerswill find a wayto derail any newinitiatives.

■ Don’t try and isolate them and ignore them either – they can create too much mischiefbehind the scenes for this to work. They will find those who have a grudge, zero in on

anyonewho is anxious, locate your weak points and expose them. You eventually end



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up managing the damage caused by your naysayers rather than devoting your energyto running your business.

In reality, there are only three effective approaches for dealing with naysayers:

1. Actively distract your naysayers –givethem aspecial assignment in some foreignoffice, pair them up with someone who needs lots of hands-on management or simplygive your naysayers so much work they have no free time to create problems for you.Sometimes distraction efforts work exceptionally well so try this first.

2. Push them out of your organization – perhaps confront them directly and bluntly tellthem their difference of opinion is hurting the enterprise and they have to either changeor go. Give them a deadline, they probably won’t meet it and then offer an earlyretirement option which is generous. If they won’t accept, send them to a job that is anobvious demotion. By all means be ethical in what you do but also explain with candorwhat’s happening and why. Taking an uncomfortable step like this now can save lots of

hassles later on if you try to keep them around.

3. Expose their behavior in such a way they feel social pressure to change – identifythem in public and let their friends and peers do all the hard yards. Do things in goodhumor if at all possible but bring all the naysayers out of the closet and expose them tothe disinfecting power of the sunlight. Left alone, they can systematically undermine allyour attempts to create a genuine sense of urgency so be bold and decisive in outingthem. Make them stand up and express their doubts openly rather than sneakingaround in the background. The naysayers will feel the heat.

Once you sort out your naysayers, don’t forget to get back to work. Remember, youdon’t grow by getting rid of negative people. You’ll only move forward as a business ifeveryone gets to work creating a twenty-first-century organization. That’s where the bulkof your efforts should be focused.

“ Acting urgently is the tactic that creates results quickly. The other three tactics can all

be started immediately, but results will take time. So you make sure that people not onlyhear the question about culture in meetings tomorrow, but they see your genuinelyurgent concern that the organization’s culture may be stopping them from succeeding.You don’t want to be frantic and lose credibility or raise questions about hidden agendas.You simply let others see some newfound energy within you on the issue of culture, aseeming belief that they must deal with the question, and soon”.

– John Kotter

“These tactics are part of what virtually all great leaders do, but using them does not

require the genes, charisma, or astonishing skills of a great leader. The use of sometactics may require a powerful position in an organization, but many can be employedby people at any level in an enterprise. All need to be used much. Much more often. Andthey can be”.

– John Kotter

“Urgency is becoming increasingly important because change is shifting from episodic

to continuous. With episodic change, the challenge of creating a sufficient sense ofurgency comes in occasional spurts. With continuous change, creating and sustaining asufficient sense of urgency are always a necessity. These two different kinds of changewill continue to challenge us but in a world where the rate of change appears to be going



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up and up, we are experiencing a more global shift from episodic to continuous”.

– John Kotter

“ An organization that can sustain a high sense of urgency over time has the potential

to become a high-performance machine, where results go from good to great andbeyond. Financial returns to investors grow past anyone’s expectations. Innovationflourishes, leading to new products and services that customers could not haveimagined. The sense of pride and excitement, and the economic rewards flowing toemployees, grows and grows still more. But sustaining urgency over time requires that itnot only be created, and created well, but that it be re-created again and again”.

– John Kotter



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Even in organizations which value urgency highly, natural forces tend to push towardsstability and contentment. These natural forces peak whenever people have workedhard and have been rewarded by a big and obvious win. Everyone will just naturallyassume the crisis is past, sacrifices are no longer needed and that all the mistakes ofthe past have now been neutralized and therefore everyone can relax. It’s awe inspiringhow rapidly an organization can lapse back into complacency whenever an immediatechallenge passes.

So what can be done about this? There are four things you can do to retain a sense ofurgency over the long haul:

1. Be aware of the cycle – and anticipate in advance what you will need to do whenurgency levels drop. If you talk about this and create lots of awareness, everyone cancontribute their best thinking and ideas.2. Plan a solution – don’t sit back and assume there’s nothing you can do. Find ways topush what’s working even harder and become highly proactive. Be in the driver’s seatrather than feeling like you’re just a passenger on a runawaytrain.3. Use the right tools –

■ Bring real live customers to your in-house meetings and discuss their needs in finedetail. Look for other marketplace information which will open eyes.vBehave with true urgency yourself. Visibly show that urgency is an absolutemust-have.■

Consider creating some kind of new crisis yourself. Release a new product whichhasbeen developed, even if you know it’s likely to fail. Let people see for themselves not



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everything your firm touches turns to gold.■ Face up to any naysayers which remain and get them sorted out.

4. Work to embed a true sense of urgency into your corporate culture and DNA – so

everyone will value the capacity to grab new opportunities, avoid new hazards andcontinually find new and better ways to win. Building a culture is a matter of creating thebehaviors you want and making them the way your organization does things. Use all thetools at your disposal to do this:

• Your promotion choices.• Your compensation scheme.• How you organize into workgroups.

In this case, patience is required. Building a culture requires a long-term view. It can’t berushed. New cultures can be exceptionally fragile so allow time for desired behaviors tosink in. Keep at it and you’ll reap the rewards.

“Today, I don’t think many organizationsanywhere have cultures that truly reflect a

sense of urgency. This will change. Some people will find that to prosper and maintainthat prosperity in a turbulent, fast-moving world, a culture of urgency is a huge asset.Through time, effort, and perhaps a bit of luck, they will create that culture. And it willprovide immense benefits to many people”.

– John Kotter

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베스트셀러

도서를

장

빠르고

효율적으로

접해보시기

바랍니다

.]

Date post:	05-Jul-2018
Category:	Documents
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A Nsense of Urgency

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