• John P. Kotter, is professor of leadership at Harvard Business School

• widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on leadership and change

• Kotter has published sixteen books

- 12 business best sellers and six of them received awards

• His books have been translated into more than one hundred foreign-language editions

Core Idea

• Need for urgency • How managers can create urgency ?• How they can maintain them ?

Kotter’s Definition on Urgency

• Urgency is a combination of thoughts feeling that lead to actual behaviour

• Thoughts – a great opportunities and hazards are there

• Feelings – a kind of gut level determination • Behaviour – hyper alertness what is going on

(it gives a feeling that we have go on)

Complacency and False Urgency

• Complacency - a feeling of contentment and self satisfaction

• Complacency is always the product of success or perceived success

• The complacent don’t look for new opportunities and hazards faced by the organization

False Sense of Urgency • False urgency is the product of failures or

some form of intense pressure that is put on a group

• They behave in ways that can easily be mistaken for people with a real sense of urgency as they are active

• Angry, anxious

Two Strategies and Four Tactics to Increase True Urgency

Strategy

1. Give people important facts

2. Winning heart and minds

Tactics

3. bring the outside in

4. Behave with urgency everyday

5. Find opportunities in crises

6. Deal with NoNos

Bring outside in • Natural tendency of every organization is to be

too internally oriented • An inside outside disconnect reduces an

organization's sense of urgency and increase complacency

• Best way to increase urgency is by reducing the gap between what is happening on the outside and what people see and feel inside the org.

Cont...

How to Do it?- Listen to customer-interfacing employees- Use the power of video- Redecorate - Send people out- Bring people in- Bring data in and communicate right way

Behave with Urgency Everyday

• Respond fast and move now• A manger must display his/her own sense of

urgency which increases the employees’ sense of urgency

• Respond fast through meetings, conversations and e-mail

• Maintaining the schedules and starting meetings on time

Find Opportunity in Crises

• “The case of Irene”- Unexpected crisis - A reaction from Irene that was neither positive

nor damage control- Careful and swift thinking on her part about

how people would feel and then act- Careful and but swift implementation of a plan

based on the assessment

Cont...

- A message given that she and the others could deal with this

- The emergence of new possibilities for action that would have been resisted before

Deal with NoNos

• NoNos are more than a skeptic • Skeptics once they have been convinced their

options are wrong, can become initiative’s biggest champions

• They prevent the people who are trying to create a sense of urgency

A critical Appreciation

• His thought are relevant as the change is no more episodic rather continuous

• Concept of creating “right culture”