Obsessive-compulsive Business
What separates a leader from a manager is the ability to motivate people. That presents a special challenge in today's economy, says John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has written books like "Leading Change."
Kotter believes businesses today must change continuously, which requires a constant motivation. Hence his new book, "A Sense of Urgency." It's a retread book dedicated to an aspect of what he wrote about in "Leading Change."
But he wrote it because he saw that businesses found this the most difficult part of changing. Kotter tells Strategy+Business in Hearts and Minds that there are six things we need to do to cause change:
- Increase urgency
- Assemble the right team, with the right vision and strategy
- Get buy-in from the appropriate people
- Make sure those people don't face barriers
- Give them some easy wins
- Keep the urgency level going
I'm dubious about any business's ability to sustain a constant sense of urgency. It's like saying every singer has to start out at their highest level and sustain that through every note and every song. Unless you exclusively hire people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, constant urgency is going to wear them out. Or make people chase their tails around trying to look busy. There are exceptions -- you could feel the urgency dripping from the pages of Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive." But not many companies run like Intel under Andy Grove.
Kotter himself acknowledges the problem of "false urgency," which he says is as bad for a business as that more common ailment, complacency. He insists, though, that being urgent without being frenetic is possible, though "very difficult...a real balancing act."
He cites in particular small high-tech firms, where people come to work every day with a drive to make something happen. But in the end, he comes up with the maddening paradox of "urgent patience." To wit:
there's no reason you can't understand the patience true change requires and at the same time think, "I'm going to get up today, and I'm going to accomplish something that contributes to that change effort. I don't have to spend all day on it. But even if I succeed in redirecting one meeting for 10 minutes in a way that starts pushing on this issue, then OK, I've accomplished something."Sounds to me like he's trying to make 'hurry up and wait' a positive thing.