Bring more urgency to your business

According to Elon Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk himself described his approach to business as follows: “A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Musk emphasised this motto time and time again. When one employee was working on the new Merlin engines for the Falcon 9 rocket, he presented an aggressive schedule for completing one of the versions. But for Musk, Isaacson reports, the plan wasn’t ambitious enough. “How the fuck can it take so long?” he asked. “That’s stupid. Cut it in half!”

Bill Gates was also known for his sense of urgency. A former Microsoft manager remembers Gates bursting into his office during his very first week with the company, and shouting: “How can you possibly take this much time working on this contract? Just get it done!”

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Apple founder Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all understood that in certain situations, speed is more crucial than perfection, especially when the goal is to quickly capture market share. When faced with criticism for releasing products before they were fully developed, Ellison responded: “How much does it cost Pepsi to get one half of one percent of the market from Coke once the market has been established? It’s very expensive … If we don’t run as hard as we can as fast as we can, and then do it again twice as fast, it’ll be cost-prohibitive for us to increase market share.”

Successful people do everything with insane urgency
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison shared a similar approach to business. Gates’ strategy was based on always anticipating the market and being the first out with a new product. However, this would frequently get Microsoft into considerable trouble, and contracts had to be revised due to unforeseen obstacles or delays.

Elon Musk knew from the outset that the rockets he was building would not be perfect straight away. What some outsiders perceived as “failed tests” were actually valuable learning opportunities for Musk to gather practical data to improve his rockets. In just a decade, Musk accomplished what NASA had struggled to achieve over several decades.

If you want to make a real difference in and with your company, you have to encourage your employees to develop a sense of urgency, according to John P. Kotter’s thesis in his excellent book A Sense of Urgency. His main thesis is immediately convincing. Every entrepreneur and every manager know that the most valuable employees are those who have an intense sense of urgency.

However, as Kotter rightly points out, it is important to distinguish the “right” urgency from the “wrong” urgency. “With a false sense of urgency, an organisation does have a great deal of energised action, but it’s driven by anxiety, anger, and frustration, and not a focused determination to win, and win as soon as is reasonably possible. With false urgency, the action has a frantic feeling: running from meeting to meeting, producing volumes of paper, moving rapidly in circles, all with a dysfunctional orientation that often prevents people from exploiting key opportunities and addressing gnawing problems.”

There are huge risks associated with mistaking “false” urgency for “real” urgency, Kotter warns. “People constantly see the frenzied action, assume that it represents true urgency, and then move ahead, only to encounter problems and failures not unlike what would happen if they were surrounded by complacency.” Some employees think that if they “run around” all day and are completely exhausted by the time they get home in the evening, this is proof of their productivity.

People who have a true sense of urgency prioritise important tasks and eliminate trivial distractions from their agendas. They do not procrastinate on high-priority matters simply because they do not currently align with their calendar. “When people have a true sense of urgency, they think that action on critical issues is needed now, not eventually, not when it fits easily into a schedule. Now means making real progress every single day.”

Tips for developing a true sense of urgency
Kotter gives some important tips for implementing a true sense of urgency:

• Purge low-priority items from your diary.
• Delegate, delegate, delegate.
• Do not allow subordinates to delegate up to you.
• Never end meetings without clarity about who will quickly do what and when.
• Demonstrate your responsiveness, passion, match words with deeds and let everyone see it, so that as many people as possible follow your example. A sense of urgency is extremely contagious, so take advantage of it.

Above all, you need to anchor a sense of urgency within your company culture – and to identify, isolate, or part ways with employees who exhibit complacency and hinder progress. The detrimental impact of these „naysayers“ on a company cannot be overstated.