A True Sense of Urgency

November 30, 2008

Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on leadership and change.  He is the premier voice on how the best organizations actually “do” change. Kotter is a graduate of MIT and Harvard. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1972. In 1980, at the age of thirty-three, he was voted tenure and a full professorship.

In his newest work, A Sense of Urgency, Kotter shows what a true sense of urgency in an organization really is, why it is becoming an exceptionally important asset, and how it can be created and sustained within organizations.

A true sense of urgency? True urgency is a gut-level determination to move and win, now. Its practitioners are unusually alert. They come to work each day determined to achieve something important, and they shed irrelevant activities to move faster and smarter. Those with a sense of true urgency are the opposite of complacent—but they are not stressed-out, anxious, generating great activity without much productivity. Instead, they are moving boldly toward the future—sharply on the lookout for both hazards and opportunities that change brings.