2. • John P. Kotter, is professor of leadership at
Harvard Business School
• widely regarded as the world’s foremost
authority on leadership and change
• Kotter has published sixteen books
- 12 business best sellers and six of them
received awards
• His books have been translated into more than
one hundred foreign-language editions
3. Core Idea
• Need for urgency
• How managers can create urgency ?
• How they can maintain them ?
4. Kotter’s Definition on Urgency
• Urgency is a combination of thoughts feeling
that lead to actual behaviour
• Thoughts – a great opportunities and hazards
are there
• Feelings – a kind of gut level determination
• Behaviour – hyper alertness what is going on
(it gives a feeling that we have go on)
5. Complacency and False Urgency
• Complacency - a feeling of contentment and
self satisfaction
• Complacency is always the product of success
or perceived success
• The complacent don’t look for new
opportunities and hazards faced by the
organization
6. False Sense of Urgency
• False urgency is the product of failures or
some form of intense pressure that is put on a
group
• They behave in ways that can easily be
mistaken for people with a real sense of
urgency as they are active
• Angry, anxious
7. Two Strategies and Four Tactics to
Increase True Urgency
Strategy
1. Give people important facts
2. Winning heart and minds
Tactics
1. bring the outside in
2. Behave with urgency everyday
3. Find opportunities in crises
4. Deal with NoNos
8. Bring outside in
• Natural tendency of every organization is to be
too internally oriented
• An inside outside disconnect reduces an
organization's sense of urgency and increase
complacency
• Best way to increase urgency is by reducing
the gap between what is happening on the
outside and what people see and feel inside the
org.
9. Cont...
How to Do it?
- Listen to customer-interfacing employees
- Use the power of video
- Redecorate
- Send people out
- Bring people in
- Bring data in and communicate right way
10. Behave with Urgency Everyday
• Respond fast and move now
• A manger must display his/her own sense of
urgency which increases the employees’ sense
of urgency
• Respond fast through meetings, conversations
and e-mail
• Maintaining the schedules and starting
meetings on time
11. Find Opportunity in Crises
• “The case of Irene”
- Unexpected crisis
- A reaction from Irene that was neither positive
nor damage control
- Careful and swift thinking on her part about
how people would feel and then act
- Careful and but swift implementation of a plan
based on the assessment
12. Cont...
- A message given that she and the others could
deal with this
- The emergence of new possibilities for action
that would have been resisted before
13. Deal with NoNos
• NoNos are more than a skeptic
• Skeptics once they have been convinced their
options are wrong, can become initiative’s
biggest champions
• They prevent the people who are trying to
create a sense of urgency
14. A critical Appreciation
• His thought are relevant as the change is no
more episodic rather continuous
• Concept of creating “right culture”
