As much as I enjoyed Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, I get the sense that I’m not going to have that experience with another book, A Sense of Urgency. It’s one of those books that when I start reading it, I get the feeling that I’ve lived through too many of the examples and it becomes painful. Too much insight, I suppose.

So, I’ll be exploring some of these parts that I like in the book. One of them is a series of question about finding complacency and false urgency…here are my favorites:

• Are critical issues delegated to consultants or task forces with little involvement of key people?
• Is candor lacking in confronting the bureaucracy and politics that are slowing down important initiatives?
• Do meetings on key issues end with no decisions about what must happen immediately (except the scheduling of another meeting)?
• Do cynical jokes undermine important discussions?

Those are a few of the questions Kotter presents in his book about targeting complacency and false urgency. I suppose the second question about candor is the one that bothers me the most.

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