Second is the whole issue of how a company’s very success leads to complacency. Success inevitably means growth, and growth means you’ve got more internal aspects of the business that must be coordinated and managed. So eyeballs turn inside, and they stop noticing the stuff outside that might make people say, “Whoa, time out. We’ve got to deal with this or that competitive threat.”
Initially, somebody might create a chart showing that the sales force, for example, has got to be focused on these customers and this market and do so with a sense of urgency. But with growth and with success, the sales force may turn away from these absolute imperatives of the business and worry more about such things as the compensation system. You wouldn’t believe how little time salespeople at some companies — at meetings and at conferences — actually spend talking about customers.
And third, a true sense of urgency is really a personal thing. I recently got called in to a large company to do some advisory work, where it was simply impossible to say that things were going well. Every performance metric — revenues, earnings, and so on — was heading down. But the level of complacency was incredibly high. Everyone agreed that the company had big problems, but those problems were always someone else’s responsibility. Too many people were thinking, “Yeah, we have problems, but I’m doing my job. The problem is she isn’t doing her job.” Given that state of mind, where’s the urgency to try new and better things in hopes of taking advantage of the opportunities and hazards the company is facing right now?
For all these reasons, it’s the newer, smaller companies competing in faster-moving environments that are better at maintaining a sense of permanent urgency. You tend to see this in some of the smaller high-tech firms, whose employees are in there every day with the goal of making something happen. So it is possible. The real challenge is making this happen in the bigger, older, low-tech companies.
S+B: What can be done to heighten a sense of urgency at companies?
KOTTER: So much of urgency is an emotional determination to make something happen, to win, and to do it now. When Louis Gerstner first became CEO of IBM in the early 1990s, the company was hugely complacent. And he told everyone, “We’re going to win. We might not win the series, but we are going to win the next game. We aren’t going to take days off — that’s not how you get there. That’s not how you make big things happen. I’m not asking you to work 200 hours a week and die. What you’ve got to do is take all the junk that you’re doing right now — and trust me, you’re doing lots of junk — and get rid of it, purge it, delegate it, whatever.” Once you do that, all of a sudden there’s more time to pay attention to opportunities and hazards and to do that consistently, without fail and without letup.
S+B: This seems to get back to the head–heart strategy for change you recommended in your book The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations (with Dan S. Cohen; Harvard Business School Press, 2002) — that is, managers must motivate people by reaching their hearts as well as their heads.
KOTTER: Exactly. The fundamental strategy for managing all change, not just creating a sense of urgency, is always a head–heart strategy, not just a head strategy.
A few years ago, I attended some top management meetings at a large company held in hopes of addressing directly some serious competitive challenges. One guy gets up and presents his material the same way almost everybody does it. He starts showing his 150 PowerPoint slides, and he’s a very smart guy, and a lot of what he’s saying is: “There are problems. We’ve got to jump on it.”
