Most executives would agree that change is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity — or perhaps an inevitability that must be managed, not feared. How leaders can help their companies cope with the turmoil of transformation has long been the concern of Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, whose numerous books on the subject include Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1996) and Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (with Holger Rathgeber; St. Martin’s Press, 2006).

Kotter’s new book, A Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), attempts to deconstruct change by focusing on what he believes to be the first step: driving an organizational culture built on the belief that change is not only desirable but must be pursued relentlessly. This alone can eliminate the risks of complacency, he argues. In his book, Kotter explores what it takes to maintain an urgent atmosphere in a corporation. First, allowing outside influences in; second, encouraging change consistently, on a daily basis, not just when it appears necessary; third, looking for the opportunities that arise in a crisis, no matter how dire; and fourth, adeptly managing the “no-nos” — employees who insist that change efforts just won’t work.

None of this is easy, Kotter says, but it can be extremely worthwhile. In an interview with the editors of strategy+business he offered his insights on why urgency is so essential to create if a company hopes to achieve sustainable transformation.

S+B: You have written a number of successful books on how to lead change. What warranted another one?
KOTTER: I argued in Leading Change that real change involves a multi-step process: (1) get the urgency up, (2) pull the right team together to focus on the correct vision and strategy, (3) communicate it to the right people for buy-in, (4) remove the barriers so you empower the people who bought in to act, (5) make sure that you’ve done it in a way that then creates some short-term successes, (6) and finally, don’t let urgency subside. When urgency starts to abate, the whole effort can easily collapse.

I’ve thought a lot about which of the steps people struggle with most. The answer, I believe, is the first step: How to generate a sense of real urgency. A lot of people I talk to, unfortunately, don’t understand how to do that very well. They face some very predictable problems, and yet they have a finite set of solutions for strategically and tactically raising the level of urgency to solve these problems.

About a year ago, a friend asked whether I thought the world was moving from episodic to continuous change. I said, “Sure.” And he asked, “Well, what are the implications for creating a sense of urgency?” And I started to think about that. When change becomes continuous, a sense of urgency becomes a generic asset, an ongoing requirement, not just the beginning of a change effort that you’ve got to get right. And that notion is what led to this book.

S+B: Why is creating a sense of urgency so difficult for so many companies?
KOTTER: First of all, a lot of companies simply have never felt a sense of urgency. They didn’t grow up on it, and if it’s not in their history, their culture, or their DNA, they struggle. And why is that? More mature companies got used to a slower-moving world, with more oligopolistic industries, less competition, a lack of global forces blowing up those oligopolies, slower technological advances, and longer product life cycles. I remember a DuPont executive telling me, “After World War II we had a product line that was technologically relevant for 20 years. Nowadays, none of mine last five years.”

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?