How -- and why -- to develop a sense of urgency
BUSINESS BOOK REVIEW
Urgency isn't mere busy-ness but a state of mind that erases complacency, writes John P. Kotter. Such an attitude, he says, is essential for firms to be able to deal with change.
Back-to-back meetings, an exploding e-mail in box, an ever-longer working day and almost permanent jet lag -- this is the familiar world of today's frenetically busy executive.
But now a distinguished author says that what so many of us really lack is a sense of urgency. Is this guy for real?
He is. John P. Kotter, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has a clear and simple message.
What most of us think of as urgency, busy-ness, is not actually making things any better. This false urgency is stressful, exhausting and unproductive.
True urgency may sometimes involve moving fast. But the most important aspects of true urgency are relentlessness, steadiness and the purposeful pursuit of a goal while "continuously purging irrelevant activities to provide time for the important and to prevent burn-out," Kotter says.
The author is perhaps the business world's favorite guru on the subject of change. His book "Leading Change" (1996) has become a classic, with its eight-step program for managing change effectively.
The first step in Kotter's approach was to create a sense of urgency. Now, a decade after publishing his bestseller, he returns to consider this first step at greater length in "A Sense of Urgency."
He has done so because he has become convinced that this sense of urgency is the top factor if change is to be handled successfully.
"Change is shifting from episodic to continuous," Kotter writes. "With episodic change, the challenge of creating a sufficient sense of urgency comes in occasional spurts. With continuous change, creating and sustaining a sufficient sense of urgency are always a necessity."
False urgency is one significant obstacle to establishing the real thing. The other is complacency. This subject is the other main theme of Kotter's book. And his analysis of the causes and consequences of complacency is well done.
Starting with a dictionary definition of complacency -- "a feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction" -- the author dissects this failing.
"Complacency is not only a thought," he writes. "It's very much a feeling. It is usually less a matter of conscious, rational analysis than unconscious emotion. . . . This point is extremely important because people usually treat complacency as a state of mind that can be changed solely with 'the cold, hard facts.' "
