I have a question for all you executive coaches working in organizations. How common is it to hear discussions on “going green” and corporate social responsibility? I’m reading a lot of things right now about this:

• Harvard Business Review, September ’09: Why Your Next Business Model Must Be Green
• Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Thomas L. Friedman
• Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, And Emerge From the Downturn on Top, by Andrew S. Winston
• Irresponsible Corporate Responsibility: Doing Good Isn’t Always Done Well
  by Alyssa Dver on Marketing Profs Blog
• CSR- So What? by Sarah Mitchell on Global Copywriting blog
• CSR: Good Ways for Small Business to Make a Positive Impact by Sarah Mitchell, Global Copywriting blog

But is corporate social responsibility something executives are serious about? Or just trying to sound good, for marketing purposes, and pleasing the public? These books make a good case based on bottom line analytics and real results from corporations such as WalMart, HP and others. But sometimes I wonder how far executives will walk their talk… comments welcome.

Inc. magazine writes about complacency & a sense of urgency in their current online edition. In this great article, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, author of A Sense of Urgency and Leading Change, talks about how to lead during a recession

Here’s an excerpt:

John Kotter got an enviable — if unintentional — endorsement when then-candidate Barack Obama began inserting the phrase a sense of urgency into his comments about the economy. A Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business Press, 2008) is the title of Kotter’s latest book on fostering change in organizations — a subject the Harvard Business School professor has owned since publishing the seminal Leading Change, in 1996.

Kotter believes there are two kinds of urgency — and, like cholesterol, one is good and one is bad. The good kind is characterized by constant scrutiny of external promise and peril. It involves relentless focus on doing only those things that move the business forward in the marketplace and on doing them right now, if not sooner. The bad kind — to which many companies have recently succumbed — is panic driven and characterized by breathless activity that winds up producing nothing demonstrably new.

This is an article you should go read in it’s entirety because it’s full of wisdom for entrepreneurs and leaders at all levels. I love the references to our own political quagmire in Washington D.C.

If you wish to use an article about this topic of complacency and a false sense of urgency, I’ve written one you can purchase. Read more about it here: Complacency – It’s Everywhere.

You would think that bad business results would be enough to shake people out of complacency, but complacency is much more common than we think. In the current economic climate, you might assume that workers would be too worried to be complacent.

But that’s not true. Author John Kotter, author of Leading Change and A Sense of Urgency, estimates that 50% of companies fail to establish a great enough sense of urgency to succeed at transformation efforts.

People gravitate towards doing whatever possible to alleviate their anxieties and worries, and will go to any lengths to avoid discomfort. Usually that means, don’t rock the boat, hang on to what used to work. That’s human nature.

Success Leads to Complacency

Often complacency’s invisible, both to managers and leaders but also to the very people involved. You may yourself be complacent and not realize it. That’s because success produces complacency, and for peace of mind, we often focus on success rather than failures or gaps.

Complacency happens on an organizational level, a team level, and all the way down to the personal level. An organization’s many years of prosperity could have ended a decade ago, and yet the complacency created by that prosperity can live on. The people involved don’t see it.

A smart, savvy manager can be oblivious to the fact that two levels below him in the hierarchy are people so complacent that his dreams of career advancement will never be realized. A person can easily live in delusional memories of success and not be aware that they are dangerously close to complacency. It’s human nature to seek routine and maintain the status quo.

False Sense of Urgency

The problem is augmented by the fact that we often replace a true sense of urgency and purpose with frantic activity and unfocused anxiety. That’s a false or misguided sense of urgency. It’s as prevalent today as complacency itself only more insidious.

Ask Yourself…

Here are questions to ask about yourself:

• How high is the sense of urgency among relevant people around you?
• How do you know this?
• If it is too low, why?
• What exactly are you doing to change this fact?
• If you aren’t able to change the level of urgency among your people, what are the consequences for your organization?
• Your career?

Hmmm, got me thinking. What about you? Are you being complacent?

People aren’t listening. They are mentally doing email, preparing for their next meeting, and thinking about other things, especially personal things. The first step in communicating is to get their urgent attention.

Think about these facts the next time you’re writing content for your newsletters or blog:

In an experiment with 60 executives, the factors most highly associated with getting attention were:

1. The message was personalized
2. It evoked an emotional response
3. It came from a trustworthy source
4. It was concise

The messages that evoked emotion and were personalized were more than twice as likely to be attended to as the messages without these attributes.

This comes from an article “Getting the Attention You Need,” in HBR Sept-Oct 2000 by T. Davenport and J. Beck. It is quoted in the excellent book The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning (Jossey-Bass, 2007).

Pattern recognition is an amazingly helpful brain process that we take for granted. It consistently helps us make split second decisions in both large and small ways.

On the tennis courts, it’s obvious. The opponent takes his racquet back in preparation, and depending on how far he turns his shoulders, I know if he’s going to hit it to my backhand or forehand side.

My brain matches up previous memories of how this player hits, compares things in a nano second to current situation and conditions, and gets me ready to return his ball even before he hits it. Sometimes…

At work or at play, pattern recognition helps us make decisions without our conscious awareness of what’s going on behind the scenes. We think we rationally and carefully weigh options, especially when it comes to hefty business decisions. But mostly, our brains are busy behind the scenes before we even become aware.

Pattern recognition is much more complex that we imagine, involving more than 30 parts of the brain. It’s not like flicking through a picture book to find matches. It’s incredibly comprehensive and fast.

Each part of the brain focuses on a different type of input and looks for a memory of past inputs that matches it. An integrating function then takes the signals about what matches have been found, makes assumptions about missing bits of information, and then arrives at a point of view. And most of the time, pattern recognition works incredibly well.

But here’s what happens when it leads us to make faulty assumptions and bad decisions: sometimes we think we recognize something familiar and it’s actually quite different. When we assume something familiar is actually the same – but it’s not – we make erroneous judgments.

This is what I’m currently reading: Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You, by Sydney Findelstein, Jo Whitehead, Andrew Campbell. It’s got some great stuff about decision making and how the brain works to help us…or can hinder us.