One of the things I often press for in my role as a board member and investor is a greater “sense of urgency” in our portfolio companies. The founders and CEOs, it turns out, are hungry for that even more than I am. It is a collective frustration.
So when I hear a suggestion on driving urgency, I take notice. I got this one from a CEO who I’ve worked closely with for years.
I find many business books to be fairly useless or at best irrelevant to my situation but I read John Kotter’s book “A Sense of Urgency” over the weekend and it was excellent. I highly recommend it.
The best thing about the book is that it creates a common definition of what “urgency” and “complacency” mean and even cautions against creating “false urgency,” which is a lot of anxious frenetic activity without no forward motion. False urgency is just as bad as complacency.
