You say something pretty provocative in the book: that sometimes, in the face of complacency, it's actually OK to manufacture a crisis.
Obviously, you need to be careful with this. If people think the boss is manipulating them to get them to work harder, it backfires. It works best if the crisis is real but no one has been paying attention. Decay in a company or an industry happens gradually, microscopically, one day at a time. Sometimes, you have to make the point: This thing is weaker than you think.
I wrote a while ago about the CEO of a health care firm who took his company through a turnaround. But then they got so far ahead, everyone settled back into a deep complacency. So he changed the context. He started asking, "Whom should we be comparing ourselves to? Yes, we're beating everybody in the marketplace. But what if the relevant question was, 'Are we beating them in the financial marketplace?'? Investors don't make choices just among companies in the same industry. Companies in different sectors are competing with us for funding. And when you run those numbers, we don't look as good." That woke people up.
It's a great question: "Whom should we be comparing ourselves to?" Detroit didn't ask it soon enough. The broadcast networks didn't ask it soon enough. Don't just look for new customers but also for new competitors. Broaden your definition of competition. You go from "Here we are, the dominant player" to "Here we are, this dinky business in a much larger pool."
One exercise I've seen leaders do is come up with a company that doesn't exist. Then they'll bring people together and say, "You are the management of that company. Your job is to kill our company." They do that in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, when their thinking is a little different, they talk about how to kill the new competitor.
Are open-book companies better at creating and sustaining urgency, because everyone is always aware of exactly where the business stands?
Not necessarily. A lot of people create heavy-duty measurement systems to track the progress of their companies, but that's not how leaders with the greatest sense of urgency do it. They pay attention to their internal numbers, but they're much more interested in what's going on outside. They want to have as many metrics about their competitors as they do about themselves.
Metrics are very useful, but they have to change like everything else. If you always measure the same things, you may always get the same answers. We think numbers keep us alert. But maybe they're putting us to sleep.
How much attention should you direct to the outside world versus internal matters?
There should be no meetings that are only about internal matters, without any connection to the outside world. In some way, the outside world always provides the "why" we are doing something. That Indian manager I mentioned is great at this. His meetings are never about internal chatter. They're always about what technology is being developed in the United States or which competitors might enter the company's market. It doesn't have to be strictly competitive. For example, if you're putting in a new software system, you should be saying, "What other companies do we know that have done this? What problems did they solve, and how did they solve them? Wouldn't that be useful information? Let's get it."
How do you get people to think like that?
You model it. You talk about the big dangers and the big opportunities. You talk in specifics: "We're a company that helps set up trade fairs. Alibaba, which does Internet trade fairs, grew 90 percent last year." You're not trying to get people to panic. You're trying to get them to think. And you always say what you are going to do first. Not just what you are going to do someday: what you are going to do tomorrow. And then you ask everyone else what they are going to do tomorrow. And if it doesn't advance the ball, they shouldn't be doing it.
One of my executive students gave me a two-page letter that his CEO had sent out in November. Part One said, "We're in a mess. Denial doesn't help. Here are some statistics to show it." Part Two said, "It is useful to look at history. Thirty years ago, this company was in a worse mess. Look at us now. We're 10 times bigger. The U.S. economy had deeper recessions every 20 years in the 19th century. And here we are -- the most powerful nation on earth." Part Three said, "We've got to link arms and address this thing, and it's going to start with me. I'm going to try my damnedest to figure out 1. how this doesn't hurt us and 2. how we can find opportunities in this. Because there are opportunities." The last part was, "Here's what I'm going to do, and here's what I need your help with." The final note was hopeful but not naive. That's great urgent leadership.
You say that urgent leadership is emotional. After a period like this, when organizational life is more than usually fraught, should you give people a break?
No. True urgent leadership doesn't drain people. It does the opposite. It energizes them. It makes them feel excited. And the idea isn't so much that the leader is always showing emotion as that he's trying to produce the right emotions in the people he leads. But again, he has to model it. You can get people to respond rationally to a problem, but if you haven't stirred their hearts and minds, once the immediate crisis has passed, you lose them. The sense of urgency dissipates.
So if the Klingons were attacking, you'd want Kirk running things, not Spock?
I don't care what the situation is. I always want Kirk running things.
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