Urgency Business Quotes

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Most people do not attack their projects with “I-have-to-get-it-done-now” urgency and therefore they do not get it done. Most people never commit like fanatics, and therefore they never become fantastic.

You cannot prove your worth by bylines and busyness.

Today, I release the urgency of outer events. I listen to the inner rhythm of God. I set my pace by divine guidance. The world and its busy agendas do not control my soul.

THE URGENCY ADDICTION Some of us get so used to the adrenaline rush of handling crises that we become dependent on it for a sense of excitement and energy. How does urgency feel? Stressful? Pressured? Tense? Exhausting? Sure. But let’s be honest. It’s also sometimes exhilarating. We feel useful. We feel successful. We feel validated. And we get good at it. Whenever there’s trouble, we ride into town, pull out our six shooter, do the varmint in, blow the smoke off the gun barrel, and ride into the sunset like a hero. It brings instant results and instant gratification. We get a temporary high from solving urgent and important crises. Then when the importance isn’t there, the urgency fix is so powerful we are drawn to do anything urgent, just to stay in motion. People expect us to be busy, overworked. It’s become a status symbol in our society—if we’re busy, we’re important; if we’re not busy, we’re almost embarrassed to admit it. Busyness is where we get our security. It’s validating, popular, and pleasing. It’s also a good excuse for not dealing with the first things in our lives. “I’d love to spend quality time with you, but I have to work. There’s this deadline. It’s urgent. Of course you understand.” “I just don’t have time to exercise. I know it’s important, but there are so many pressing things right now. Maybe when things slow down a little.

The guarantee of tax revenues can make city leaders complacent, and so city leaders must actively work to embrace a critical desire to serve tax payers the way business leaders desire to serve customers and with the same sense of urgency.

When you are the central character in a seemingly boiling pit of “busy-ness” the time will come when the pace of decline cannot be countered. You build yourself the circumstances of ultimate failure by failing to grow, by failing to act on your learnings.

People say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” as they hasten that very death, both literally and figuratively. They trade their health for a few more working hours. They trade the long-term viability of their business or their career before the urgency of some temporal crisis.

Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean! If priorities are not clearly understood at the top, how distorted will they be down the line?

He feels a kind of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him... and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete.

In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.

Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.

Jesus’ mood is determined and decisive: He is on the way to Jerusalem, and He wants followers who can count the cost. The three different levels of commitment shown in people He met expose the ways many Christians relate to their discipleship today. The first man made a grand, pious commitment that went no deeper than words. He promised to follow the Master wherever He went. Jesus challenged the man to count the cost. So often we come to Christ to receive what we want to solve problems or gain inspiration for our challenges. He gives both with abundance, but then calls us into a ministry of concern and caring. We are to do for others what He has done for us. Loving and forgiving are not always easy. The second man had unfinished business from the past. He wanted to follow Christ, but a secondary loyalty kept him tied to the past. In substance, Christ said, “Forget the past; follow Me!” The third person wanted to say goodbye to his family. Jesus stresses the urgency of our commitment. Our commitment must be unreserved to seek first His kingdom. Are there entangling loyalties you have brought into the Christian life that make it difficult to give your whole mind and heart and will to Christ?

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

WHAT CAN YOU HAVE found at Holme to entertain you all this time?” complained Sir Julius, looking at his friend through his quizzing glass. His lordship had come down to London on business. Within the hour, news of his arrival had reached a good number of his acquaintances. He had been invited to dine by three particular friends, and a note had been brought around to his house asking him to present himself at his mother’s house as a matter of urgency. Having been in London several days and having failed to abide by her wishes, the earl was bracing himself for an imminent visit from the countess. As his lordship had a very fair notion of what his mother wished to ask him about, he was much relieved to have found Sir Julius upon his doorstep instead.

successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is “What’s the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is “What’s the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

Examples for warm-market prospects: “You’ve been very successful and I’ve always respected the way you’ve done business.” “You’ve always been supportive of me and I appreciate that so much.” (Great to use with family and close friends.) “You have an amazing mind for business and can see things other people don’t see.” “For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve thought you were the best at what you do.” Examples for cold-market prospects: “You’ve given me some of the best service I’ve ever received.” “You are super sharp. Can I ask what you do for a living?” “You’ve made this a fantastic experience.” The key to the compliment is, it must be sincere. Find something you can honestly use to compliment your prospect and use it. This simple step will literally double your invitation results. When you start with urgency and a compliment, it becomes very difficult for a person to react negatively to your invitation. People don’t hear compliments very often. It feels good. You will find your prospects will become very receptive.

When Bindi, Robert, and I got home on the evening of Steve’s death, we encountered a strange scene that we ourselves had created. The plan had been that Steve would get back from his Ocean’s Deadlist film shoot before we got back from Tasmania. So we’d left the house with a funny surprise for him. We got large plush toys and arranged them in a grouping to look like the family. We sat one that represented me on the sofa, a teddy bear about her size for Bindi, and a plush orangutan for Robert. We dressed the smaller toys in the kids’ clothes, and the big doll in my clothes. I went to the zoo photographer and got close-up photographs of our faces that we taped onto the heads of the dolls. We posed them as if we were having dinner, and I wrote a note for Steve. “Surprise,” the note said. “We didn’t go to Tasmania! We are here waiting for you and we love you and miss you so much! We will see you soon. Love, Terri, Bindi, and Robert.” The surprise was meant for Steve when he returned and we weren’t there. Instead the dolls silently waited for us, our plush-toy doubles, ghostly reminders of a happier life. Wes, Joy, and Frank came into the house with me and the kids. We never entertained, we never had anyone over, and now suddenly our living room seemed full. Unaccustomed to company, Robert greeted each one at the door. “Take your shoes off before you come in,” he said seriously. I looked over at him. He was clearly bewildered but trying so hard to be a little man. We had to make arrangements to bring Steve home. I tried to keep things as private as possible. One of Steve’s former classmates at school ran the funeral home in Caloundra that would be handling the arrangements. He had known the Irwin family for years, and I recall thinking how hard this was going to be for him as well. Bindi approached me. “I want to say good-bye to Daddy,” she said. “You are welcome to, honey,” I said. “But you need to remember when Daddy said good-bye to his mother, that last image of her haunted him while he was awake and asleep for the rest of his life.” I suggested that perhaps Bindi would like to remember her daddy as she last saw him, standing on top of the truck next to that outback airstrip, waving good-bye with both arms and holding the note that she had given him. Bindi agreed, and I knew it was the right decision, a small step in the right direction. I knew the one thing that I had wanted to do all along was to get to Steve. I felt an urgency to continue on from the zoo and travel up to the Cape to be with him. But I knew what Steve would have said. His concern would have been getting the kids settled and in bed, not getting all tangled up in the media turmoil. Our guests decided on their own to get going and let us get on with our night. I gave the kids a bath and fixed them something to eat. I got Robert settled in bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Bindi looked worried. Usually I curled up with Robert in the evening, while Steve curled up with Bindi. “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “Robert’s already asleep. You can sleep in my bed with me.” Little Bindi soon dropped off to sleep, but I lay awake. It felt as though I had died and was starting over with a new life. I mentally reviewed my years as a child growing up in Oregon, as an adult running my own business, then meeting Steve, becoming his wife and the mother of our children. Now, at age forty-two, I was starting again.

Without the assumption that an advantage will be long-lived, the urgency of an organization to move quickly increases.

elite entrepreneurs respond quickly, put their business first, consult with mentors often, hire the best team, create an environment of stressful urgency, use time wisely, and so on. The

Perfect balance in sales is combining sense of urgency to close deals with great patience to listen, understand and act in a customer's best interest.

Our lives change. What was valued, necessary to us last year, imperceptibly loses its urgency, becomes discarded. People you had thought you loved, occupations that engaged your eager attention, where are they now? Correspondence on a cause once vital is laid aside to be read another day. Across the room at an exhibit you see a face dear to you as your face was dear to him a year ago. You give each other a nod of casual friendliness. If you are near enough you greet each other with a pricking, a stir in memory of happiness, of quarrels. You may smile at each other ruefully, make a date for lunch, but the hot animating flame has died. We move on to new work, new loves. And if there are vacuums, if at times the hear cries out, we busy ourselves investing our energies elsewhere. It isn't until years later that you learn each project, each relationship, long or short, has left its mark, changed obliquely your understanding of yourself or others.

If your audience is overly complacent, begin with the complication to create a sense of urgency.

We needed a greater sense of urgency.” So the management team decided that field managers would not be eligible for promotion unless their branch or group of branches matched or exceeded the company’s average scores. That’s a pretty radical idea when you think about it: giving customers, in effect, veto power over managerial pay raises and promotions. The rigorous implementation of this simple customer feedback system had a clear impact on business. As the survey scores rose, so did Enterprise’s growth relative to its competition. Taylor cites the linking of customer feedback to employee rewards as one of the most important reasons that Enterprise has continued to grow,

When is the urgency rate high enough? From what I have seen, the answer is when about 75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business as usual is totally unacceptable. Anything less can produce very serious problems later on in the process.

Businesses make lots of mistakes, so part of the point of business is to analyze them, to correct them, to have some sense of urgency about it; to have a management environment where it’s okay to acknowledge mistakes—that way you can fix them,” Dimon added.

Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a neverending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean! If priorities are not clearly understood at the top, how distorted will they be down the line?

The gain frame around synergies lacks a sense of urgency and may lead the potential purchaser to think that they can do this deal sometime in the future. Instead, you want to use loss framing by highlighting the risks in the potential acquirer's business that will be mitigated by owning your company. Building your BATNA by generating other interested purchasers will also help you to create a strong loss frame because you can highlight the competitors' interest in acquiring your company and the risk to the potential acquirer if their competitor owns your business.

The three categories of urgency will help you recalibrate what’s immediate and what can wait: NOT TIME SENSITIVE: When an immediate answer is not needed. TACTICALLY TIME SENSITIVE: When fast action is tied to a business result. EMOTIONALLY TIME SENSITIVE: When a feeling of urgency stems from emotion, curiosity, or stress.

He backed me into the wall and kissed me with a force, an urgency, a passion that took my breath away. This wasn’t just a flirty kiss. It was serious business.

untapped need. Give employees three weeks to develop proposals, and then have them evaluate one another’s ideas, advancing the most original submissions to the next round. The winners receive a budget, a team, and the relevant mentoring and sponsorship to make their ideas a reality. 2. Picture yourself as the enemy. People often fail to generate new ideas due to a lack of urgency. You can create urgency by implementing the “kill the company” exercise from Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink. Gather a group together and invite them to spend an hour brainstorming about how to put the organization out of business—or decimate

untapped need. Give employees three weeks to develop proposals, and then have them evaluate one another’s ideas, advancing the most original submissions to the next round. The winners receive a budget, a team, and the relevant mentoring and sponsorship to make their ideas a reality. 2. Picture yourself as the enemy. People often fail to generate new ideas due to a lack of urgency. You can create urgency by implementing the “kill the company” exercise from Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink. Gather a group together and invite them to spend an hour brainstorming about how to put the organization out of business—or decimate its most popular product, service, or technology. Then, hold a discussion about the most serious threats and how to convert them into opportunities to transition from defense to offense. 3. Invite employees from different functions and levels to pitch ideas. At DreamWorks Animation, even accountants and lawyers are encouraged and trained to present movie ideas. This kind of creative engagement can add skill variety to work, making it more interesting for employees while increasing the organization’s access to new ideas. And involving employees in pitching has another benefit: When they participate in generating ideas, they adopt a creative

The dilemma for software developers is that business managers are not equipped to evaluate the importance of architecture. That’s what software developers were hired to do. Therefore it is the responsibility of the software development team to assert the importance of architecture over the urgency of features.

There are many different paths to superior outcomes in business. You will have to find your own path, one that suits your temperament, disposition, and natural aptitudes. Therefore, don't try to copy or emulate other leaders—including me. Don't ask yourself in tough situations, “What would Frank do?” That will only slow down the process of finding your own path. Instead, make the most of your unique aggregate of experiences. Apply those experiences, and the insights we've discussed in previous chapters, to become a truer, more honed, more effective version of who you already are. Finding your own path, however long it takes, will unlock your personal power.

Plan your 168-hour master plan. Execute the critical action items in the master action plan with precision. Measure your performance daily. Plan your next day night before. Have a Mentor (our mentor Terry Johal) Follow your trainer (Terry Johal & Harjap Singh) My superhero power (Kuldeep and I identified our strengths) We took ownership. Every moment we have urgency, and we are committed. Most important every 90 days we are changing how we operate our business and are training our team members to do the same. Every new business partner we enroll, receives an Execute 90 book as a welcome present. This ensures that everyone on our team is on the same page.

tactics that businesses use to meet their deadlines or motivate their workers are a way of reapportioning that urgency: by moving up deadlines, by breaking them up into shorter chunks, by focusing the mission, by making teams interdependent. The trick is to feel that deadline effect constantly, even when the deadline itself has disappeared.

Perhaps, look for the same career‐frustrated person I had been all these years. It was quite satisfying to turn this into a high‐powered strategy to drive business. I ended up with better, cheaper, more loyal, more motivated talent than we would have with a conventional hiring mentality. It does come with risk, but there is always risk in hiring. I have misfired with great resumes plenty of times.

The legal system will always be exploited by those who cannot compete on merit. The legality of a business tactic doesn't matter; it's all about what people can get away with.

But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won't lose, but you won't win either. Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That's why very few enterprises that were in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend

Teach your people to drive the business to the limits of its potential. So what if you don't get there? At least you went for it! Don't settle for respectable mediocrity; seek to exploit every ounce of potential you are entrusted with. If you want to win big, imagine a radically different future that is not tethered to the past. This is why innovation always seems to come from the least expected places. They don't have a past to care about. They have nothing to lose, no ships to burn behind them.

such situations, at any level of a company, the first order of business is sorting out the valuable people from the deadweight (including but not exclusively those with a passenger attitude). Then you have to do what Jim Collins described in Good to Great as moving the wrong people off the bus and putting the right ones on the bus, in the right seats. In that order.

Selling in these initial stages is more akin to business development than a defined, repeatable sales process. In a business development situation, every aspect is interpreted case by case, and we adapt to the circumstances at hand. Pricing and contract terms are flexible. Selling, by contrast, is a systemic, highly standardized process.

Even those who have never interacted with X will hear through the grapevine that X is abusive, unscrupulous, dishonest, or whatever the problem might be. If such behavior goes unaddressed—or even worse, if it is rewarded with a promotion for delivering strong business results—people across the company will conclude that the values and the inspirational posters are bullshit. Everyone will know that the real, unspoken culture is “Do whatever you want, as long as you make your numbers.

I recently recommended to Lea Endres, CEO of NationBuilder, which builds software for community leaders, that she follow Senghor’s lead. NationBuilder was operating close to the red and Endres was frustrated because, despite her reminding everyone that cash collection was a priority, she couldn’t get her team to care enough about it. Our conversation went like this: Lea: I’m really worried about cash collections. We use this outsourced finance firm and they don’t care. We have a low cash balance and we got surprised last month. A couple more surprises and we’re in deep trouble. Ben: Is there a team on it? How much do you need to collect this month? Lea: Yes. And $1.1 million at least. Ben: If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!” Two weeks later: Lea: You wouldn’t believe some of the excuses. One was that we have an auto email that is one sentence long that tells customers they are late—but it doesn’t tell them what to do! I’m like, “Well, then, let’s fix the damned email!” We’re making progress and they know I want my money. End of quarter: Lea: We collected $1.6 million in September! And the team loves hearing me say “Where’s my money?!?!” To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

Leadership is a lonely business. You live 24/7 with uncertainty, anxiety, and the fear of personal failure. You make countless decisions, and being wrong about any of them might let down your employees and investors. The stakes, both financial and human, are high. And what adds to the terror is that there is no manual, no how‐to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early‐stage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war.

I’ve puzzled for years over the question of why some companies fail to adapt quickly enough to what Clayton Christensen called “disruptive innovation,” while others don’t. Reflecting on cases in our research studies, I’ve concluded that the primary answer is really quite simple—failure to apply productive paranoia, not just in the short term, but also with a fifteen-plus-year time frame. When executive teams visit my management lab in Boulder, I often ask them the following three questions: What significant changes in your world (both inside your company and in the external environment) are you highly confident will have happened by fifteen years from now? Which of those changes pose a significant or existential threat to your company? What do you need to begin doing now—with urgency—to march ahead of those changes?

The best BHAGs make you think big. They force you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity. The only way to achieve a BHAG is with a relentless sense of urgency, day after day, week after week, month after month, for years. What do you need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve your BHAG?

The tendency to focus on the positive comes long before the customer actually makes a purchase decision. Early in the sales process, for example, when sellers are trying to get to higher levels within the account, a salesperson might say, “Mr. Customer, I would like to get a few minutes with your CFO to show him how cost-effective our products are relative to increasing productivity and maximizing the return on your investment.” Sounds like a mini elevator pitch, doesn’t it? Here’s the reverse. “Mr. Customer, would it make sense to spend a few minutes and bring your CFO up to speed, so he doesn’t have a knee-jerk reaction and torpedo the idea?” In preparation for QBS training events, I always ask for a conference call to customize the material for the intended audience. But I don’t ask for a manager’s time so I can “understand their business and deliver better training.” Although these are positive benefits, they don’t necessarily create a sense of urgency. Therefore, I am more inclined to ask a vice president of sales for time on their calendar, “so we don’t completely miss the boat at the upcoming training event.” Both of these questions refer to benefits that would come from strategizing in advance. But how you ask does make a difference.

Found business pain creates opportunity. Quantified business pain drives higher price points. Implicated business pain drives urgency. Business pain and urgency finds business Champions. Business champions get you to the Economic Buyer. The Economic Buyer has access to major funds. You sell big deals based on value. The opposite is also true: No discovered pain means a small or no opportunity. No quantified business pain means no cost justification. No implicated business pain means no urgency to buy. No business Champion means no access to the Economic Buyer. No access to the Economic Buyer means no access to major funds. No access to major funds means either selling small deals based on product features or selling no deals.

If you’re Red, you’ll likely have already moved on to the next chapter, but could I ask you to consider my suggestion? You’re already painfully aware of how your feeling of urgency has worked against you, and your lack of interest in details has probably cost you a pretty penny. You know that you respond too quickly—sometimes even before you’ve understood the question you’ve been asked.

But a Red detests inactivity. Things must happen. Add to this a sense of constant urgency, and a great deal will get done.

Rest assured that we understand the urgency of the situation and that you’ll be apprised of how it’s going as soon as I find out myself.

Urgency is a good sales tool. Expiring bonuses, price increases, and time-sensitive offers are a few ways to create urgency.

Most subject lines fall under the following categories: • Curiosity • Urgency or scarcity • Special offers • Social proof (e.g., How I did…/THIS made me…) • Benefit • Story (e.g., I failed…/I never thought…) Experiment with subject line styles from different categories.

For tripwires, because of their low price point, time sensitivity is the easiest way to create urgency.

There are 5 (+1) aspects of a tripwire strategy: 1. A simple product 2. A simple sales page 3. A pathway 4. Urgency—an evergreen timer 5. File delivery + payment processor 6. Retargeting ad *This is an optional step. It helps to maximize your sales but is not a must if you don’t have a budget for ads*

After contracting Lyme disease and operating at ~10% capacity for 9 months in 2014, I made health #1. Prior to Lyme, I’d worked out and eaten well, but when push came to shove, “health #1” was negotiable. Now, it’s literally #1. What does this mean? If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a conference call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning. In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine with paying, or I will lose weeks or months to sickness and fatigue. Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolutely all-or-nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important not to. The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health a rarity. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Most companies only have a few GMs at the very highest levels. The people underneath them play a functional role, but the GM owns the P&L outcome. Amazon, in contrast, has GMs running things at every level. GMs report to other GMs. Some GMs are Level 7 on the pay scale and others are at Level 3. In addition to being “single-threaded leaders” who drive urgency and focus for each line of business, these GM roles represent thousands of learning opportunities for future leaders around Amazon.

Ultimately, the strike never happened. Some players felt, after speaking with the team’s attorney, John Langel, that striking before the Algarve Cup didn’t offer enough leverage. They were better off going to Portugal and continuing negotiations there with striking as an option after the tournament, before the start of the NWSL. They believed the launch of the new league offered the urgency that could make a strike effective. For Solo, who pushed for the strike, it was frustrating to see her teammates back off so quickly. Even though the Algarve Cup was a relatively minor tournament, it was the biggest national team event on the calendar until the 2015 World Cup, two and a half years away. The advice of the team’s longtime attorney to forgo the pre–Algarve Cup strike amounted to taking the federation’s side, as far as Solo was concerned. By that point, she had already lost faith in Langel’s ability to fight for the team and months earlier had started, on her own, looking for someone else who could represent the team. “It was really empowering for us. We finally were taking a huge stance against U.S. Soccer—we said, We’re putting our foot down, we’re going on strike, we mean business,” Solo says. “Well, it took about one phone call from John Langel to scare us into backing down and not going on strike.

As with any other industry, Hospitality and Travel must continue to innovate in order to stay relevant in the modern world. The pandemic has only accelerated this urgency of this inevitable need and pushed technology to the forefront of business management.

MAKE EMAIL SUBJECT LINES CLEAR, CATCHY, AND ACTIONABLE Most subject lines fall under the following categories: • Curiosity • Urgency or scarcity • Special offers • Social proof (e.g., How I did…/THIS made me…) • Benefit • Story (e.g., I failed…/I never thought…) Experiment with subject line styles from different categories. See what attracts your audience. If your email service provider has an A/B or split test function, use it. Incorporate symbols or emojis to get attention as well. But don’t overdo them or they lose their effect on your subscribers.

Everyone teaches and preaches that you have to take massive action to get massive results. That is a very true statement. I decided to break that down even further and let you know that urgency is what needs to come first so you actually take the massive action. Urgency is the core trait that will allow you to overcome whatever obstacles and road-blocks come up in this business (or any business).

All of our successes at the three companies where I've been CEO trace back to superior architecture.

A corporation should look to create an internal ExO when: An opportunity is one to two adjacencies away from the company’s core business—perhaps a different business model, buyer, user or go-to market. Urgency is low—there is still time until the market’s inflection point. The company is able to hire the necessary talent. This approach typically maximizes control and minimizes costs for those markets that must be “owned” given their strategic nature.

In 1863, as Havana continued to grow, the need for expansion prompted the removal of the city walls. The Ten Years’ War ended with a cease fire from Spain. However, it was followed by the Cuban War of Independence, which lasted from 1895 until 1898 and prompted intervention by the United States. The American occupation of Cuba lasted until 1902. After Cuban Independence came into being, another period of expansion in Havana followed, leading to the construction of beautiful apartment buildings for the new middle class and mansions for the wealthy. During the 1920’s, Cuba developed the largest middle class per total population in all of Latin America, necessitating additional accommodations and amenities in the capital city. As ships and airplanes provided reliable transportation, visitors saw Havana as a refuge from the colder cities in the North. To accommodate the tourists, luxury hotels, including the Hotel Nacional and the Habana Riviera, were built. In the 1950’s gambling and prostitution became widespread and the city became the new playground of the Americas, bringing in more income than Las Vegas. Now that Cuba senses an end to the embargo and hopes to cultivate a new relationship with the United States, construction in Havana has taken on a new sense of urgency. Expecting that Havana will once again become a tourist destination, the French construction group “Bouygues” is busy building Havana's newest luxury hotel. This past June Starwood’s mid-market Four Points Havana, became the first U.S. hotel, owned by Marriott, to open in Cuba. The historic Manzana de Gómez building which was once Cuba's first European-style shopping arcade has now been transformed into the Swiss based Manzana Kempinski, Gran Hotel, La Habana. It has now become Cuba's first new 5-Star Hotel! Spanish resort hotels dot the beaches east of Havana and China is expected to build 108,000 new hotel rooms for the largest tourist facility in the Caribbean. On the other end of the spectrum is the 14 room Hotel Terral whch has a prime spot on the Malecón.

but the benefits of featuring the potential pitfalls of not doing business with us are much easier to include than we may think. Blog subjects, e-mail content, and bullet points on our website can all include elements of potential failure to give our customers a sense of urgency when it comes to our products and services.

In this context Mugabe was eager to maintain the loyalty of key allies, particularly in the security services. As the economy at home shrunk, so did opportunities for domestic patronage. The Congo war provided the opportunity he needed to keep his collaborators happy and busy elsewhere. This explains the urgency with which the Congolese and Zimbabweans set up their joint ventures and how easily Zimbabwean officials

Grant said. "I've already told you too much," Evers replied. It struck Grant that suddenly Evers looked very old. "It won't be long now," he said quietly. Grant's mind was racing too fast to catch the remark, but once he did, he came crashing to a stop. "Not long until what?" "There's more," Evers said, urgency rising into his voice, "much more you need to know; I'm sorry I won't get a chance to tell you. But you don't last as long as I have in this business without planning for every possible contingency, and trust me, I have. So did your father." "I don't understand," said Grant. "How long has it been, son?" Evers asked, wistful. "How long since you were there? Your parents' old house?" Grant blinked. "I don't know. More than twenty-five years, I guess." "Go back." "What? Why?" The first home he'd ever known-where his father and sister lived with him, before the orphanage-was military housing on an old Army base north of Monterey. Only vague images remained as his memory of the place. "Would the house even

But it is not just a matter of communicating reality; it is communicating that reality with a sense of urgency. Too many of our church members treat their congregation as a religious country club. They pay their dues and expect to be served. It is the “me-first” attitude that is endemic in the unhealthy churches in America. We must communicate the urgency of the gospel. We must remind people again and again that John 14: 6 is true, that Christ is the only way of salvation. We must tell the hopeless that they have hope in Christ. We are running out of time, and we can’t do church business as usual. It is time for our churches to wake up. It is time to lead change in our churches.

For Hitler, the removal of the German population of the Baltic had become a matter of urgency, as Stalin had intimated he was in no mood to be patient. The availability of the Incorporated Eastern Territories enabled him to kill two birds with one stone. Jews and racially unassimilable Poles would be forcibly transferred to the Generalgouvernement. Their houses, farms, and businesses would be assigned to the Baltic Germans, for whom persuasion to move to the newly conquered lands would hardly be necessary.

It’s about the multiplication of urgency and importance, and having the foresight to know that the solutions you provide can reach people at the time of their most desperate need.

If people can trust that everyone's motivations are honorable, not political, it allows them to focus on the problems and challenges of the business without getting defensive.

declaring my own mistakes, I signaled to everyone that it was safe to admit their mistakes too, without fearing extreme consequences. No one gets everything right all the time. The faster we all face our demons and correct ourselves, the better off the business will be.

A busy sales funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team,

customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department. This means that when a problem arises, every department has a responsibility to fix it.

Just because you might save a business doesn't mean that it's worth saving.

don't wait for the crush of urgent business to calm down.

For a business to break out and reach escape velocity, it needs a ton of differentiation. It needs to profoundly upset and disrupt the status quo.

Accounting can become the bastardization of economics when it obfuscates the inherent profitability of the business by focusing on current period income and expenses.

Similarly, where our goals and dreams come from will determine whether we feel great about pursuing them or not. Like everything in this world, there is nothing inherently good or bad, only our thinking makes it so. Goals, dreams, and ambitions are not good or bad, so it's not really an either-or situation, but more about where those goals are coming from. There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation. When goals are created out of desperation, we feel a large sense of scarcity and urgency. It feels heavy, like a burden, we may even feel daunted by the colossal task we've just committed ourselves to, imposter syndrome and self-doubt begin to manifest, and we always feel like we never have enough time for anything. We go about our life frantically, desperately searching for answers and ways that we can accomplish our goal faster, always looking externally, never feeling enough or that we can ever get enough. Worst of all, if we happen to accomplish our goal, within a few hours or days afterwards, all of those same feelings of lack begin to resurface. We begin not feeling content with what we have done, unable to savor our accomplishments and because what we did never feels like it’s enough, we feel that same way about ourselves. Not knowing what else to do, we look around for guidance externally to see what others are doing and see they're continuing to do the same thing. Thus, we go ahead and proceed to set another goal out of desperation in an attempt to escape all of the negative feelings gnawing away at our soul. When we dig a little deeper into these types of goals we set, they are all typically “means goals” and not “end goals”. In other words, the goals we set in this state of desperation are all a means to an end. There's always a reason we want to accomplish the goal and it's always for something else. For example, we want to create a multi-million-dollar business because we want financial freedom, or we want to quit our job so that we can escape the stress and anxiety that comes from it. We feel like we HAVE to do these things instead of WANT to. Goals created from desperation are typically "realistic" and created from analyzing our past and what we think to be "plausible" in the moment. It feels very confining and limiting. Although these types of goals and dreams may excite us in the moment, as soon as we begin to try to create it, we feel a lack, and we are desperate to bring the dream to life. Paradoxically, if we do end up achieving a goal created out of desperation, we end up feeling even more empty than we did before it. The next "logical" thing we tend to do is to set an even bigger goal out of even greater desperation to hopefully make us feel whole inside.