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John Kotter's Urgent Message for Entrepreneurs

Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, author of Leading Change, talks about how to lead during a recession

John Kotter got an enviable -- if unintentional -- endorsement when then-candidate Barack Obama began inserting the phrase a sense of urgency into his comments about the economy. A Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business Press, 2008) is the title of Kotter's latest book on fostering change in organizations -- a subject the Harvard Business School professor has owned since publishing the seminal Leading Change, in 1996.

Kotter believes there are two kinds of urgency -- and, like cholesterol, one is good and one is bad. The good kind is characterized by constant scrutiny of external promise and peril. It involves relentless focus on doing only those things that move the business forward in the marketplace and on doing them right now, if not sooner. The bad kind -- to which many companies have recently succumbed -- is panic driven and characterized by breathless activity that winds up producing nothing demonstrably new.

Kotter advises leaders to stamp out the bad urgency, which demoralizes and drains people, and use the -- dare we say it? -- opportunity of the economic crisis to remake their organizations with a lean and hungry look. And he encourages them to sustain that newfound urgency even when flush times return. Editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan spoke with Kotter about his urgent call to urgency.

Samuel Johnson said nothing focuses the mind like a hanging. Has that happened with the recession? Has it focused the minds of company leaders and created the sense of urgency you advocate?

I wish that it had. Many companies probably think they're responding with urgency, and there are certainly a lot of people running around trying to come up with solutions. But most of that activity is going to be ineffectual, because it is driven by a fear of losing. It's not that gut-level determination to win and to make absolutely sure that they do something every single day to keep pushing that goal forward. That's true urgency.

How can you distinguish good urgency from bad urgency?

There are lots of signs of false urgency. Frenetic activity. Everyone is exhausted, working 14-hour days. One red flag is how difficult it is to schedule a meeting. With true urgency, people leave lots of white space on their calendars, because they recognize that the important stuff -- the stuff they need to deal with immediately -- is going to happen. If you're overbooked, you can't manage pressing problems or even recognize they're pressing until too late.

People think that in urgent situations, they're expected to take on more and more. They're worried about keeping their jobs, so they try to demonstrate their value by being incredibly busy. But the leader should be telling them to do just the opposite. He should say, "I want everyone to look at your calendars. What's on there that doesn't clearly move us forward? Get rid of it!"

True urgency is the most important precursor of real change. Seventy percent of change efforts fail or never launch at all, and one reason is that company leaders don't create a sense of urgency around what they're doing. They go straight to solving the problem. So, with true urgency, you would expect to see change. Something new should be happening. How many companies are going to come out of this doing things in a new way? Not just diminished but actually changed?

One of the best -- or worst -- examples of this is Washington, D.C. Are the two parties interacting with each other in a new way to reflect the new situation in the economy? Are the special-interest groups behaving in a new way? Is the administration staffing itself in a fundamentally new way? No. But they're all extremely busy.

If the economy and job loss don't jump-start change there, what will?

It's hard to imagine that these days anyone could feel complacent, but the fact is, Washington is crammed with complacency. Because the country has done pretty well over the last 250 or 300 years. Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats? Obama started using the phrase a sense of urgency during his campaign. That's a good sign.

But then he waited two months to get change started, because "there's only one President at a time."

Funny you should say that. I wrote an op-ed piece that I never sent to anybody, in which I talked about what I would do if I had been elected President. On November 5, the day after the election, I would have made a 15-minute speech on TV. I would have said that our economic problems are significant, and they're going to stop me from fulfilling all my promises. And I would have made it very clear that, though I'm not President now, I pledge to you that starting tomorrow morning -- on November 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th -- I am going to make damn sure that the people around me and I are making headway on this. And I want you to help me, because I think that collectively, we can turn something horrible into something that might even energize us in some way.

There's something similar going on right now at an 80-year-old manufacturing company I studied. It's in the middle of a corporate succession. The new guy is taking over in October. And he's trying very hard not to be disrespectful and start pretending he's running the place before the CEO is gone. That's a mistake. He should get in front of the crowd and make his urgency speech. With a real sense of urgency, you're not held back by protocols or concern about hurting someone's feelings.

This month, we're publishing the Inc. 500, our list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. As you say, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling complacent these days. But I wonder whether companies are most vulnerable to complacency after a big success.

If you've been successful long enough, complacency doesn't disappear easily. And it's fine to celebrate success: You have a sales appreciation meeting and give out a bunch of awards to your employees. They deserve it. They helped you to grow 30 percent this year. But that's history. So you ask them, "What do you have on your calendar for tomorrow that's going to help us grow 30 percent next year?"