Urgency Culture Quotes

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.

We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropriates our mild forms of xenophobia into its own virulent project. Difference among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions, asking questions and being better informed of our mutual realities. To transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our shared nakedness.

At this stage of the game, I don’t have the time for patience and tolerance. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have listened to people ask their questions, explained to them, mollified them. No more. That time is past. Now, as Norman Mailer said in Naked and the Dead, ‘I hate everything which is not in myself.’ If it doesn’t have a direct bearing on what I’m advocating, if it doesn’t augment or stimulate my life and thinking, I don’t want to hear it. It has to add something to my life. There’s no more time for explaining and being ecumenical anymore. No more time. That’s a characteristic I share with the new generation of Satanists, which might best be termed, and has labeled itself in many ways, an ‘Apocalypse culture.’ Not that they believe in the biblical Apocalypse—the ultimate war between good and evil. Quite the contrary. But that there is an urgency, a need to get on with things and stop wailing and if it ends tomorrow, at least we’ll know we’ve lived today. It’s a ‘fiddle while Rome burns’ philosophy. It’s the Satanic philosophy. If the generation born in the 50’s grew up in the shadow of The Bomb and had to assimilate the possibility of imminent self destruction of the entire planet at any time, those born in the 60’s have had to reconcile the inevitability of our own destruction, not through the bomb but through mindless, uncontrolled overpopulation. And somehow resolve in themselves, looking at what history has taught us, that no amount of yelling, protesting, placard waving, marching, wailing—or even more constructive avenues like running for government office or trying to write books to wake people up—is going to do a damn bit of good. The majority of humans have an inborn death wish—they want to destroy themselves and everything beautiful. To finally realize that we’re living in a world after the zenith of creativity, and that we can see so clearly the mechanics of our own destruction, is a terrible realization. Most people can’t face it. They’d rather retreat to the comfort of New Age mysticism. That’s all right. All we want, those few of us who have the strength to realize what’s going on, is the freedom to create and entertain and share with each other, to preserve and cherish what we can while we can, and to build our own little citadels away from the insensitivity of the rest of the world.

For a considerable portion of humanity today, it is possible and indeed likely that one's neighbor, one's colleague, or one's employer will have a different mother tongue, eat different food, and follow a different religion than oneself. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect. In such a world, I feel, it is vital for us to find genuinely sustainable and universal approach to ethics, inner values, and personal integrity-an approach that can transcend religious, cultural, and racial differences and appeal to people at a sustainable, universal approach is what I call the project of secular ethics. All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death. And just as the doctrine of divine judgment underlies ethical teachings in many theistic religions, so too does the doctrine of karma and future lives in non-theistic religions. As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being-by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance-does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices. The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. On this understanding, ethics consists less of rules to be obeyed than of principles for inner self-regulation to promote those aspects of our nature which we recognize as conducive to our own well-being and that of others. It is by moving beyond narrow self-interest that we find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life.

To understand those who are culturally and historically different from us – rather than resorting to such labels as ‘evil empire’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘terrorist’ to mask our ignorance – is a matter of urgency. The greatest hubris is to ask why ‘they’ are not like ‘us’, to accept our cultural biases lazily and without question, and to frame the problem in terms of ‘what went wrong?

Okay, but what about microbial disease? “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we’re killing are our protectors.” In fact, the twentieth-century war on bacteria—with its profligate use of antibiotics, and routine sterilization of food—has undermined our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. “For the first time in human history, it has become important to consciously replenish our microflora.” Hence the urgency of cultural revival. And

Propaganda infuses our culture with messages that there are just a few winners and many losers; that we are killing the earth and time is running out; that prosperity is an anachronism and detrimental to life; that individual freedom is selfish and injures those who are less free. These messages are crafted to shame and pressure you, and to create a sense of urgency that impairs your ability to reason clearly.

Our culture has created a sense of urgency and expectation that's hard to shake.

There is no rush. There is no urgency. Unravel from the lies of white supremacy culture. Rest is a meticulous love practice.

In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.

The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight.

The steps are: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering a broad base of people to take action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing even more change, and institutionalizing new approaches in the culture.

Walking was a habit he'd been unwilling to give up. He couldn't see the point in shutting himself up in a vehivle any more often than he had to, doing damage to the earth and the air in order to avoid using his body. People did just that all the time, though. Most claimed they needed to save time. It was true they had little enough of that-- their lives were so soon ended. But Nathan didn't see them treating time as precious otherwise. They'd sit in their cars at a fast-food place for fifteen minutes when it would be quicker to park and go inside. No, he blamed the modern culture of urgency. Only the most urgent sensations, emotions, and situations were considered important. They called it living life to the fullest. Not surprisingly, many sought numbness in alcohol or the pervasive voyeurism of reality TV while others tried to live a perpetual peak experience through drugs, sex, or celebrity. Ordinary lives, ordinary living had little value. Nathan thought people needed to wash dishes by hand sometimes. Prepare their own meals more often. And take walks.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage.

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer--or interpret, or imagine--much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.

Causes: As important a fact as any individual cause on earth is the vital incapacity of the human individual to distinguish between genuine cause and one which is foisted upon him by pressure, environment, propaganda, conditioning. If people had the sense they pretend to have, they would seek this fundamental distinction perceptible. Hardly anyone makes this effort. This is partly because it is an invisible but powerful part of their culture to teach that conditioned emotionality and ‘causes’ whose necessity, urgency or rightness is only conditioned into them, are necessarily, right.

The world is broken up by tribalism—the British, the German, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, are tribes. See the fact that they are tribes, glorified as nations, and that this tribalism is creating havoc in the world, bringing wars in the world. Each tribe thinks in its own culture opposed to other cultures. But tribalism is the root, not the culture. Observing the fact of that is the action that frees the brain from the condition of tribalism. You see actually, not theoretically or ideationally, the fact that tribalism glorified as nations is one of the causes of war. That is a fact. There are other causes of war, economics and so on, but one of the causes is tribalism. When you see that, perceive that, and see that cannot bring about peace, the very perception frees the brain from its conditioning of tribalism. One of the factors of contention throughout the world is religion. You are a Catholic, I am a Muslim, based on ideas, propaganda of hundreds or thousands of years; the Hindu and the Buddhist ideas are of thousands of years. We have been programmed like a computer. That programming has brought about great architecture, great paintings, great music, but it has not brought peace to mankind. When you see the fact of that, you do not belong to any religion. When there are half a dozen gurus in the same place, they bring about misery, contradiction, conflict: “My guru is better than yours; my group is more sanctified than yours; I have been initiated, you have not.” You know all the nonsense that goes on. So when you see all this around you as an actual fact, then you do not belong to any group, to any guru, to any religion, to any political commitment of ideas. In the serious urgency to live peacefully there must be freedom from all this because they are the causes of dissension, division. Truth is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any church, to any group, to any religion. The brain must be free to discover it. And peace can exist only when there is freedom from fallacy. You know, for most of us, to be so drastic about things is very difficult, because we have taken security in things of illusion, in things that are not facts, and it is very difficult to let them go. It is not a matter of exercising will, or taking a decision: “I will not belong to anything” is another fallacy. We commit ourselves to some group, to an idea, to religious quackery, because we think it is some kind of security for us. In all these things there is no security, and therefore there is no peace. The brain must be secure; but the brain, with its thought, has sought security in things that are illusory.

The conscious mind is occupied with the immediate, the limited present, whereas the unconscious is under the weight of centuries, and cannot be stemmed or turned aside by an immediate necessity. The unconscious has the quality of deep time, and the conscious mind, with its recent culture, cannot deal with it according to its passing urgencies. To eradicate self-contradiction, the superficial mind must understand this fact and be quiescent, which does not mean giving scope to the innumerable urges of the hidden. When there is no resistance between the open and the hidden, then the hidden, because it has the patience of time, will not violate the immediate.

A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. [...] Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. [...] Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpeter, and no amount of knowledge even of all three of tis elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder.

Her later work on adolescent girls and their “silenced” voices shows us a different Gilligan. Her ideas were successful in the sense that they inspired activists in organizations like the AAUW and the Ms. Foundation to go on red alert in an effort to save the nation’s “drowning and disappearing” daughters. But all their activism was based on a false premise: that girls were subdued, neglected, and diminished. In fact, the opposite was true: girls were moving ahead of boys in most of the ways that count. Gilligan’s powerful myth of the incredible shrinking girl did more harm than good. It patronized girls, portraying them as victims of the culture. It diverted attention from the academic deficits of boys. It also gave urgency and credibility to a specious self-esteem movement that wasted everybody’s time.

Another example of neoracist influence in K–12 public education comes from New York City. In 2018, the NYC Department of Education earmarked $23 million for mandatory “anti-bias” training for the city’s teachers over the course of four years. Leading this charge was chancellor of schools Richard Carranza, whose philosophy has less to do with eliminating actual racism than with eliminating so-called white supremacy culture in schools. In a presentation to top administrators, Carranza called for an end to all aspects of white supremacy, including “a sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” “perfectionism,” “individualism,” and “objectivity.” Instead of these false values, he argued that teachers should prioritize non-white values like “the ability to relate to others.” The idea that perfectionism, objectivity, and good grammar belong to white people and shouldn’t be taught to blacks and Hispanics is exactly the kind of idea that leaders of the civil rights movement fought against. There is nothing anti-racist about this idea. It is, at its core, racist.

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 Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

Empathetic living is never forgetting how it feels to be lost. It is hard to empathize with the unsaved if you have forgotten what your life was like before you surrendered to Christ. For a glimpse of this concept, go to Rev 5:4. John is in heaven kneeling before the throne of God. He notices several scrolls being grasped by the One sitting on the throne. He then realizes that if no one steps out to open the scrolls containing the redemptive history of humankind, then everyone is destined to spend eternity in hell. John’s response was to cry uncontrollably for fear of a lost eternity! We must display the same urgency in our daily lives for the unsaved in our spheres of influence. Empathetic living is taking what Satan means for destruction and turning it around for the glory of God. Everyone has a testimony of God’s grace and love. It may be the loss of a friend, personal illness, loss of a job, or the challenge of a disability. Being the liar that he is, Satan will try to use difficult times to pull you away from God. In reality God is sufficient and wants to use your testimony to celebrate His wonders and empathetically to point people to Him! Empathetic living is relating to the emotional pain of hurting people. Learn to relate to the pain of others. Hurt with them. Pray for them. Share Christ with them! Empathetic living is living an authentic life, not hiding your warts. Part of living an empathetic life is learning to live with your personal struggles and shortcomings (warts). People in today’s culture are not looking for perfect examples to follow. Rather, they would prefer that you identify with them as flawed human beings. In doing so, people are more comfortable developing relationships, thus it is easier to open the door for gospel conversations. Remember, accepting and loving people is not the same as condoning their sinful behavior! Empathetic living is proclaiming complete restoration through Christ. The ultimate outcome of putting empathy into action is to see hurting and unsaved people restored through the power of the gospel. By becoming vulnerable enough to feel a person’s pain, you are living out the message of Christ to people in need of a Savior. —

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?

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?

awake at night?” The response is practically unanimous: Leaders worry about creating a sense of urgency in their organizations and operating quickly in an increasingly complex world. They want to create strong teams that are primed to handle any hurdle that comes their way and

Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility)

The cure for the pain is the pain. Unprocessed pain almost always leads to something much worse than pain. Opening ourselves up to our emotional reactions to that world and allowing ourselves to feel the gamut of emotions that opening inevitably produces is the beginning of a movement toward wholeness and healing. This can produce energy, focus, and a sense of urgency. To quote Bob Dylan, “Behind every beautiful thing is some kind of pain.

having access to boatloads of capital can be a competitive weapon if a startup has to confront aggressive rivals. But raising a big round can damage a startup, too, if it allows management to spend in profligate ways. Marc Andreessen suggests that a startup that has raised too much money can “become infected with a culture of complacency, laziness, and arrogance.” Resulting dysfunctions can include 1) over-hiring, with a commensurate slowdown in decision-making as too many managers get involved; and 2) schedule slippage, as employees say, “What’s the urgency? We have all this cash.

big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities. We valued traits such as strong task ownership, a sense of urgency, and a “no excuses” mentality. People who get things done rather than explain why they can't. This personality type lines up with our obsession with hiring drivers rather than passengers, as we saw in an earlier chapter.

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.

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.

Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences. If you want a strong culture, you will have to make hard decisions to let certain people go for the greater good. There's no way to avoid those cases.

Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day? Start compressing cycle times. We can move so much quicker if we just change the mindset. Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker, and new energy and urgency will be everywhere. Good performers crave a culture of energy.

Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences. It's also vitally important—yet very difficult—to maintain your intellectual honesty. Can you see things as they really are and fully appreciate what is happening? Human nature has a strong tendency to rationalize situations, to convince us that no significant changes are necessary. Reality can rattle us, making us nervous and uncomfortable. To cope with the stress, we talk ourselves into a less damning interpretation. This is why groupthink and confirmation bias are common and incredibly dangerous to the well‐being of the enterprise. It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.

High‐growth enterprises are not easy places to live. The pressure is relentless. Performance is aggressively managed. There is no let up. I have seen employees depart after a short time because the intensity and pace just wasn’t their cup of tea. Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose. It’s unlikely that a strong, effective, and mission‐aligned culture will please everybody.

The way we hold ourselves and others to the lie of urgency is white supremacy culture and we will never be able to rest or be liberated from oppression while we are honoring and aligning with it.

Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take? In our oldest stories, we are reminded that this was a questions of profound concern for our ancestors. When we rely deeply on other lives, there is urgency to protect them. Our ancestors, who had so few material possessions, devoted a great deal of attention to this qauestion, while we who are drowning in possessions scarcely give it a thought. The cultural landscape may have changed, but the conundrum has not - the need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human.

A culture of brainstorming is a culture of urgency. It's a recognition that there are infinite opportunities that can be capitalized on if we can recognize them and move on them now.

Old Testament poetry and especially Old Testament wisdom evoke a world charged with God’s grandeur as the Creator and redeemer. In the process of evoking this world, Old Testament wisdom invites, cajoles and even commands us to live our lives consciously in this world. Biblical poetry is never poetry for poetry’s sake. Yet it is still aesthetic and to be savored as such. Its creativity with words, sounds and images gives it its evocative and memorable powers. All of these wisdom books naturally became a part of the traditions in the home, the community and at festival gatherings. Each book thus generated a formative presence in the cultural consciousness of God’s people. In sum, we simply will not hear God’s address through Old Testament wisdom if we fail to attend closely to its poetic character. Here is a brief look at each of the books studied in the following chapters. Proverbs. Proverbs 1–9 is a highly symbolic collection of sayings from two very different sources: Woman Wisdom and the parents of a maturing son. The son is a realistic but fictional character entering the actual world adults encounter day to day. Woman Wisdom, however, is a fictional and cosmic character who, as wisdom personified, beckons the son to desire her ways and paths. This may be a complex way of getting at what’s going on in all of the imagery, but it alerts us to the great power of biblical art. The mysterious woman character creates the symbolic and allusive points of view introduced above. The point is not for the young man to believe that this woman is a human; rather, he is drawn to make the theological and experiential connections between God’s created purpose and the world he will soon enter as an adult. The woman’s cosmic, feminine character attaches urgency and emotion to the simple actions of life in this world, for they will be played out before God within the deep, mysterious, cosmic order he has formed.

Now that sense of intellectual urgency has dissipated. Tolerance, relativism, the postmodern refusal to commit, the cultural triumph of uncertainty – all these rule out a repeat of the pyrotechnics in H3. Perhaps, too, there is currently so much specialization, and so many movements and fissures within higher education, that the important questions have been lost.

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.

Government surveillance, beyond its legal implications, wreaks havoc on the emotional landscape of individuals, transforming the very essence of personal freedom into a monitored spectacle. The damage inflicted is not confined to the erosion of privacy; it extends into the realm of trust, fracturing the delicate covenant between citizens and their government. The emotional toll of constant surveillance is immeasurable, creating a pervasive culture of anxiety and self-censorship as individuals grapple with the knowledge that their every move is being scrutinized. Historical instances of surveillance excesses, from the Stasi to contemporary controversies, underscore the urgency of recognizing the unlawfulness of such practices and the imperative to reclaim our right to privacy for the sake of our collective well-being.

Culture is not about making people feel good per se, it’s about enabling the mission with the behaviors and values that serve that purpose.

When not much is done to drive a cohesive, consistent culture across the organization, you end up with an amalgamation of different value systems across functions and geographies.

Your competitors can gain access to capital, hire away your talent, and steal your ideas, but they almost certainly can't replicate your culture.

We now live in similar conditions—all kinds of people of divergent cultures and psychologies are thrown together. But because we live in a society of more apparent abundance and ease, we lack that sense of urgency to connect to other people. This is dangerous. In such a melting pot as the modern world, with people’s tastes changing at a faster pace than ever before, our success depends on our ability to move outside ourselves and connect to other social networks. At all costs, you need to continually force yourself outward. You must reach a point where any sense of losing this connection to your environment translates into a feeling of vulnerability and peril.

A big red flag in many workplace cultures is a sense of entitlement. We always sought low maintenance, low drama personalities.

if you persevere over long periods of time, if you focus intensely on delivering value for customers, and if you build a disciplined culture for your employees, it will all pay off in the long run.

If I am a man, I am a man who always questions, who is driven to ask with a visceral urgency as irresistible and insatiable as an itch in a fold of my brain.

You only get the culture you desire if you actively pursue and enforce compliance.

Culture results from consequences, good and bad, as well as from the lack of consequences.

High‐trust workplace cultures tend to correlate with high‐performance organizations.

Napoleon was content with being behind on his mail, even if it upset some people or if he missed out on some gossip, because it meant that trivial problems had to resolve themselves without him. We need to cultivate a similar attitude—give things a little space, don’t consume news in real time, be a season or two behind on the latest trend or cultural phenomenon, don’t let your inbox lord over your life. The important stuff will still be important by the time you get to it. The unimportant will have made its insignificance obvious (or simply disappeared). Then, with stillness rather than needless urgency or exhaustion, you will be able to sit down and give what deserves consideration your full attention.

Today, these four dimensions of the heart confront substantial challenges primarily driven by contemporary lifestyle habits, societal norms, and cultural shifts. The urgency of addressing these challenges is underscored by the alarming rise in lifestyle-related diseases affecting the physical heart and the escalating mental health crises impacting our emotional well-being.

Back then, poets seemed quaint, possibly irrelevant, but there is something about crisis that returns us to the fundamentals to make sense of an uncertain future and remind us of what we need to know. It’s been that way since humans began telling stories. We sang our poems, we chanted them. Only later did we write them down: Gilgamesh and the Iliad and Ramayana. Akhmatova and Tupac Shakur. In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.

This kiss is so massively different from the first two. There's no salty taste to this one, no struggling to breathe through hiccuping sobs. No eyes on us, no modesty, no hesitation. But this beautiful hunger, this urgency for closeness, this desire to lap up every sensation we can pull from each other.

Consequently, a wide variety of perspectives and frameworks have been developed for trying to understand what cities are, how they arose, how they function, and what their future is. Just within academia itself there is a dizzying array of separate departments, centers, and institutes representing a broad spectrum of alternative ways of perceiving cities: urban geography, urban economics, urban planning, urban studies, urbanomics, architectural studies, and many more, each with its own culture, paradigm, and agenda, though rarely interacting with one another. The situation is rapidly changing as new developments are being initiated, many stimulated by the advent of big data and the vision of smart cities, both somewhat naively touted as panaceas for solving all of our urban problems. But tellingly, there are as yet no explicit departments of “urban science” or “urban physics.” These represent a new frontier as the urgency to understand cities from a more scientific perspective emerges. This is the context of what I am presenting here, namely using scale as a powerful tool for opening a window onto the development of a quantitative conceptual integrated systemic framework for understanding cities.

The urgency to own stuff and have it now is promulgated by our culture. In the USA, tax incentives for mortgage debt have been around since the 1930s. The idea was that debt enslaved—a man with a mortgage won’t go on strike. It was a way to control a worker for his or her working years.

Put these corporate attributes together—clear direction, individual accountability, a sense of urgency, constant feedback, clarity of mission—and you begin to have a sense of Apple’s values. Values may be a squishy topic in the corporate world, a term that’s interchangeable with culture or core beliefs.

In comparison with cyberfeminist texts rife with irony, gynocentric metaphors, and poetic references to cultural theory, Firestone’s book has an appeal of its own, something that could, following Melissa Gregg, be conceptualized as Firestone’s affective voice. Gregg refers to a particular contagious affect in the forms of address adopted by an author that has the power and effect of engaging readers and activating them into critical practices — be these textual or other. Sarah Franklin has suggested that the importance of The Dialectic of Sex lies in its analysis and critique of gender and discrimination more than in the concrete solutions that it proposes. The appeal of Firestone’s affective voice could well be added to the list: committed to rethinking culture, technology, gender, and society, it is occasionally blunt, seldom ironic, incessantly passionate, and contagious in its urgency.

The genius of George Fox was his emphasis on the individual’s direct encounter with God through the Holy Spirit. Yet an inherent weakness of Quakerism was its over-reliance on this direct experience of the Holy Spirit at the expense of the Word. The Quakers lacked an emphasis on the written Word of God as a corrective to individualistic spirituality. They also lacked dedication to the clear mission to make disciples of the nations. Their energy for mission was poured into commercial success and transforming society. Meanwhile, their lack of urgency in multiplying disciples meant they ultimately lost their cultural influence.

Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the “White City” seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. . . . As if the half-light ruling this perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but deliberately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the faces here, which held an urgency somehow too intense for the full light of day and those innocent American visitors with their Kodaks and parasols who might somehow happen across this place.

For churches that observe behaviors from the list on the right, this is a strong indication that the associated convictions are not consistently held within the body. Leaders are often surprised when these deviant behaviors manifest, especially in a church with strong, biblical doctrinal and mission statements. We, as leaders, often assume that the things we hold dear transfer by osmosis to our church members. Sadly, it just doesn’t work this way. For example, many evangelical churches pride themselves on having a robust theology and conviction about the immanent return of Christ. And, if a majority of members in one of these churches was asked how they should live in light of that conviction, many would say something like, “I should live ready for His return any day.” Yet the same church may demonstrate consistently a lack of urgency. How can this be? Simple. People don’t always really believe what they say they believe. There is often disparity between actual beliefs and articulated ones. These cultural inconsistencies are pervasive and no church is immune. At Austin Stone, where Kevin serves as lead pastor, there was a time at the start of the church when this truth became so clear. For years, the leadership team talked about the call of every Christian to be a part of the mission of God. Yet, when looking deeply at the church, something was not quite right. The worship services were growing, but impact in the city was not. The team knew it needed more than just a sermon, more than just a class or a strategy. The church needed a cultural change. The Austin Stone was certain that God was calling her to be a church for the city of Austin, but teaching a list of “dos and don’ts” wasn’t going to get her there.4 The seeds for a city-loving, God-honoring church were in there, but until God altered some of the fundamental beliefs as a local church, nothing would have changed. The church needed to really believe the urgency of the mission, needed to really believe that the Lord was inviting His people to join Him on mission in all spheres of life. Culture change is key.

Without cultural change, we are hopeless to change existing results.5 Of all changes, cultural change is the most difficult. It is essentially changing the collective DNA of an entire group of people. To understand how to change culture, it is helpful to know how change works in general. Changing Church Culture Change is extremely difficult. One of the most vivid and striking examples of this painful reality is the inability of heart patients to change even when confronted with grim reality. Roughly six hundred thousand people have a heart bypass each year in the United States. These patients are told they must change. They must change their eating habits, must exercise, and quit smoking and drinking. If they do not, they will die. The case for change is so compelling that they are literally told, “Change or die.”6 Yet despite the clear instructions and painful reality, 90 percent of the patients do not change. Within two years of hearing such brutal facts, they remain the same. Change is that challenging for people. For the vast majority of patients, death is chosen over change. Yet leadership is often about change, about moving a group of people to a new future. Perhaps the most recognized leadership book on leading an organization to change is John Kotter’s Leading Change. And when ministry leaders speak or write about leadership, they often look to the wisdom found in the book of Nehemiah, as it chronicles Nehemiah’s leadership in rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah led wide-scale change. Nehemiah never read Kotter’s book, and he led well without it. The Lord well equipped Nehemiah for the task of leading God’s people. But it is fascinating to see how Nehemiah’s actions mirror much of what Kotter has observed in leaders who successfully lead change. With a leadership development culture in mind, here are the eight steps for leading change, according to Kotter, and how one can see them in Nehemiah’s leadership. 1. Establish a sense of urgency. Leaders must create dissatisfaction with an ineffective status quo. They must help others develop a sense of angst over the brokenness around them. Nehemiah heard a negative report from Jerusalem, and it crushed him to the point of weeping, fasting, and prayer (Neh. 1:3–4). Sadly, the horrible situation in Jerusalem had become the status quo. The disgrace did not bother the people in the same way that it frustrated Nehemiah. After he arrived in Jerusalem, he walked around and observed the destruction. Before he launched the vision of rebuilding the wall, Nehemiah pointed out to the people that they were in trouble and ruins. He started with urgency, not vision. Without urgency, plans for change do not work. If you assess your culture and find deviant behaviors that reveal some inaccurate theological beliefs, you must create urgency by pointing these out. If you assess your culture and find a lack of leadership development, a sense of urgency must be created. Leadership development is an urgent matter because the mission the Lord has given us is so great.