My CEO is reading A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter. While I haven't read the book yet, he gave me copy of Mr. Kotter's chart "Complacency, False Urgency, and True Urgency" (page 10 - 11). Under the category of "behavior," Kotter proposed the following definitions:
- Complacency: Unchanging activity: action which ignores an organization's new opportunities or hazards, focuses inward, does whatever has been the norm in the past (many meetings or no meetings, 9 to 5 or 8 to 6).
- False Sense of Urgency: Frenetic activity: meeting-meeting, writing-writing, going-going, projects-projects, with task force after task force and Powerpoint to the extreme - all of which exhausts and greatly stresses people.
- A True Sense of Urgency: Urgent activity: action which is alert, fast moving, focused externally on the important issues, relentless, and continuously purging irrelevant activities to provide time for the important and to prevent burnout.
Do you recognize your firm in any of these three?
