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Apr
21
A Sense of Urgency
Filed Under Leadership, Reading Room | 2 Comments
We are much too complacent. And we don’t even know it.
—John P. Kotter
Although familiar with John P. Kotter and his best-selling books Leading Change and Our Iceberg Is Melting, I am finally getting around to immersing myself in some of his genius. Kotter’s latest book, A Sense of Urgency, is both accessible and actionable, even if I can’t relate to all of his big biz stories and examples. After all, he is a professor of leadership at that place.
If you don’t have time to read A Sense of Urgency, it’s definitely worth skimming. Everything, says Kotter, must start with a true sense of urgency. Like most wisdom, the big idea here is not breathtaking. It’s the implementation of such wisdom that separates the wise from the weary.
The Strategy
Create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities—all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.
Kotter suggests four tactics to increase a true sense of urgency:
1. Bring the Outside in
Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sites, and sounds.
2. Behave with Urgency Every Day
Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email and do so as visible as possible to as many people as possible.
3. Find Opportunity in Crises
Always be alert to see if crises can be a friends, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complacency. Proceed with caution, and never be naïve, since crises can be deadly.
4. Deal with the NoNos
Remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.
Apr
8
Sell Handcuffs
Filed Under Wisdom | Leave a Comment
“Might the future of business lie in encouraging shoulds rather than indulging wants? Could corporations help us bring out our better selves?”
As usual, Dan Heath and Chip Heath have a great column in the April 2009 issue of Fast Company. They write about why customers will pay to restrain themselves.
Think about a piggy bank, which is like a security system for a world where you’re the burglar. In purchasing a piggy, you’re paying $10 to protect $22 in spare change from your own hands. Life is full of piggy-bank situations, where we crave restrictions on our own behavior. Might your business benefit from helping your customers handcuff themselves?
From watching television while running the treadmill to the Antabuse pill used by alcoholics to make you sick when you drink, “All of us seek ways to save ourselves from our own weaknesses,” say the authors.
Time’s Michael Grunwald echoes this thinking in his April 13 article. Grunwald successfully argues how the Obama team is using the science of change and behavioral economics to fundamentally alter the way we live. Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is “obsessed with behavioral economics.” Orszag took part in a recent marathon and, to ensure he finished, he setup a significant automatic donation to a charity he did not like in the event he did not cross the finish line.
It’s interesting to think how businesses could leverage this way of thinking. The Heath brothers have a few examples of their own, as does Grunwald’s article.
Apr
6
The End of Excess
Filed Under Big Ideal | Leave a Comment
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain
The April 6 Time cover story by Kurt Andersen is yet another addition to my growing collection of essays on excess.
Andersen’s opening line is as bold as it is incriminating: “Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time. He continues…
In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the ’80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%.
The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late ’80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It’s as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life. And we started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by about half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 lb. heavier than someone the same age back then. In the late ’70s, 15% of Americans were obese; now a third are.
The rest of the article is a great re-cap of how we’ve gotten to where we are, and what “The Great Reset” means to the way we live.