This is URGENT

Welcome back Kotter: A Sense of Urgency

by David Zinger

John Kotter has done a lot of work to help us manage and navigate through organizational change. Kotter is back with A Sense of Urgency.

Kotter maintains the number one problem organizations face when trying to execute change is creating a sense of urgency. We need to create and recreate urgency because it is not a natural state of affairs.

In the field of employee engagement, how urgent are your actions, initiatives, and programs? I encourage you to make them more urgent by reading this post and using the resources listed at the end of this article.

Here are 3 quotations from Kotter’s Change This Manifesto on Urgency published today (September 10th.).

The few people who do have smoke pouring into their offices are furious that somebody has started a fire. But instead of demonstrating a real sense of urgency to solve the problem, starting today, they complain.

In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster—literally, disaster.

With a true sense of urgency, people want to come to work each day ready to cooperate energetically and responsively with intelligent initiatives from others. And they do.

Kotter offers 4 tactics to establish urgency:

1. Bring the outside in.
2. Behave with urgency everyday.
3. Find opportunity in crises.
4. Deal with the NoNos

Are you ready to get Urgent? Here is how to proceed.

• Immediately Read Kotter’s free Change This Manifesto: It All Starts With A Sense of Urgency.
• Go online and purchase Kotter’s Book: A Sense of Urgency.
• While you wait for the book watch the following Harvard Business Review 10:41 minute interview with John on The Importance of Urgency.
• Get started now by taking urgent action on engagement for yourself and for your organization.

If the video failed to load in this window you can watch it here.

I wasn’t going to upload this post until tomorrow but I got the sense of urgency.

And now, I hope you…GET URGENT!