A Sense of Urgency
by John Kotter
Several observations before the review proper: this book is probably twice as long as it needs to be. It’s 194 pages but it’s 194 pages with wide margins and spacing and graphics that I can only call word-charts. I think it would make an excellent 100 page book. As I read I was also reminded of that great quote in Hamel and Prahalad’s Competing for the Future: "The urgent drives out the important, the future goes largely unexplored; and the capacity to act, rather than the capacity to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure of leadership.” In this case Kotter would add “false” to the word urgency but Kotter would have no trouble agreeing with the quote. It’s too bad there is no bibliography in the Kotter book—I’d love to see if Kotter used it.
John Kotter, author of a number of organizational change books, argues in A Sense of Urgency that, given the speed at which business is changing, firms need to be continually changing just to survive. Kotter feels that one way to change productively and continuously is to create a sense of urgency in the firm. Without that sense of urgency, Kotter feels, a firm is almost predestined to rest on its laurels, falling on complacency and ultimately killing itself. He provides many examples of how complacency can kill. Even though these examples are mostly anonymous, they are real strengths of his book, as they show it as based in the real world of business.
In the first few chapters of his book, Kotter distinguishes among three key organizational approaches: complacency, where the firm focuses internally, not looking for outside opportunities or internal improvements; false urgency, where firm members are very very active but primarily out of anxiety to justify their positions (this refers back to the Hamel/Prahalad quote); and true urgency, which focuses on the market outside the firm, constantly scanning for potential opportunities or danger signals. Kotter presents many examples of these three approaches so he can move from definition to strategies and tactics to fight complacency and false urgency and to create a sense of true urgency so workers can continuously improve the firm’s productivity.
The strategy that Kotter suggests is to not depend on making a case for change by focusing on the purely logical. He describes this as the fallacy of the case study, where people can logically approach the issues but are not passionately involved. Kotter says that for real urgency to occur, it’s necessary to engage the heart as well as the head. An executive seeking to move his company beyond complacency, for example, needs to tell a compelling story and to show real passion when he/she requests true urgency. You will not see that emotional argument in many Harvard Business Press publications; Harvard Business School teaches by the logical case study.
So how does one engage the heart? Kotter suggests four tactics. The first is to bring the outside in—to show that there are real challenges in the marketplace, as well as real opportunities that will be grabbed by competitors unless the firm gets its act together and moves very swiftly. Data brought in might be data on how a critical relationship is going or not going, data on an opportunity out there that a competitor is working on that would lose the firm market share, or data demonstrating shrinking sales in critical product areas. Kotter suggests bringing critical customers or outside experts in to talk about where the firm is meeting and, more critically, where it is not meeting his/her expectations.
The second tactic is to behave with urgency every day, and there are a number of great examples of urgent employees and how they approach their work. The main point is that if the executives are asking their employees for urgency, they should be acting urgently themselves, setting an example. But when executives ask for urgency and then can’t get anything done quickly themselves, they are sending a message that urgency is not that critical an activity.
The third tactic is to find opportunity in crisis. In other words, when a crisis arrives, it’s a great time to act with true urgency and make lemonade with the lemons one is handed. Kotter is not saying that within all crises there are opportunities to be gained but rather that positivity and creativity can sometimes turn a bad situation into a far better one.
The fourth tactic is the most developed in the rest of Kotter’s book—it is called dealing with No-no’s and it is at once the funniest and the saddest of Kotter’s tactics. Here he speaks of the particularly complacent individual, perhaps an executive, who is fixated on maintaining the status quo. Kotter shows that the firm cannot ignore the No-no, that this person can undermine all the positive things that may be happening in an emerging urgent organization. He suggests trying not to fire the No-no because the No-no can still wreak havoc with the organization. The best advice he can give with the No-no is to distract them. In one great example, a firm sends the main and powerful No-no to Asia to meet a real business challenge but also to stay away from the creation of the truly urgent culture.
There is no question that Kotter knows what he is talking about—any business reader can recognize the individuals he is describing, as well as their complacency. His strategies and tactics seem sound. In the final sections he talks about the perils of the successful organization, where a firm can have a great success and then fall prey to complacency. The real challenge that Kotter brings out is to continually create true urgency to keep the firm moving quickly forward. It’s too easy for employees after a success to feel complacent, that they can now rest because of their success. Kotter feels that using a crisis to create urgency must be a real crisis, that if the CEO tries to engineer a crisis to get the firm moving, there is a danger that he/she might be seen as manipulative and might lose all credibility.
Kotter’s book focuses primarily on the need to create urgency in an organization, and he goes to some lengths to show how such creation might begin. I suspect that this book is a prelude to Kotter’s next one, which will focus more directly on how to continually create urgency in a firm. I will be looking forward to reading it.
Reviewed by S4 Consulting
© S4 Consulting
