This is URGENT
By David Zinger on Sep 10, 2008 in Employee Engagement
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:
- Bring the outside in.
- Behave with urgency everyday.
- Find opportunity in crises.
- 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!
Stephen J. Gill | Sep 15, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for this blog post about John Kotter’s book, manifesto, and interview. I like your title, “Welcome Back Kotter”, but I’m afraid it dates us. I wonder if the problems with Lehman Brothers and the other financial giants who are currently in trouble have more to do with a past lack of “urgency,” and a sense of complacency, than with the economy.
David Zinger | Sep 15, 2008 | Reply
Stephen:
I don’t mind being dates as long as it is not carbon dated! Good point about urgency and the economic troubles of the financial giants.
David