The urgent need for patience  Everyone is in a rush. Don’t panic

The standard international measurements of time have not been altered, as far as I know, but that sense of the world being always on, 24/7/365, with events relentlessly confronting us, is strong.

Perhaps we are just imagining it. Yet the impact of continuous news programmes, overexcited social media channels and beeping electronic gadgets can keep people on edge. There is even a popular podcast called Oh God, What Now?

The C-suite and boardroom are not the places for twitchiness or panic. But no-one is immune to the pressures of the age, or the need for speed. This has become clear in recent months.

First, Unilever, the venerable consumer goods giant, decided that its still-newish chief executive (less than two years in post) Hein Schumacher would have to go. He was, it seems, not moving fast enough to reposition the company.

It was not entirely obvious that Schumacher had been hanging about. He had announced an €800 million cost-saving programme, 7,500 job losses (the biggest such cuts at the firm for 25 years) and the decision to spin off the famous ice cream business (Magnum, Wall’s and Ben & Jerry’s).

He had also implicitly criticised his predecessors for overdoing it a bit with all the talk of “purpose” and sustainability. The company’s efforts had been too “thinly spread”, he said, and had made “too many long-term commitments that failed to make a sufficient short-term impact”.

Schumacher was replaced by the chief financial officer Fernando Fernandez, who, it was said, would move faster to drive change: he was more “abrasive” and less “cuddly” than the outgoing chief executive. He certainly made his mark quickly. In March he said that another €1 billion of food brands could be sold off. “I don’t have any emotional engagement with any brand when it comes to portfolio management,” he told one analyst.

So, full speed ahead it is then. But, not so fast! This is what Murray Auchincloss, chief executive of BP, the oil and gas company, told investors this year: “In 2020 we made some bold strategic changes, accelerating into the energy transition while progressively reducing our hydrocarbon business… Our optimism for a fast (energy) transition was misplaced, and we went too far, too fast.”

And so saying, Auchincloss announced a sharp reduction in green energy investment and a renewed commitment to oil and gas. Sometimes, it seems, you can move too fast after all.

Some businesses can report a dramatic (and positive) change in their fortunes. Earlier this year Tufan Erginbilgic, chief executive of engineering firm Rolls-Royce, was able to reinstate dividend payments to shareholders for the first time in five years. Since his appointment in 2023 – inheriting a “burning platform”, as he put it – the company’s shares have risen by an astonishing 500%. He had moved fast, cutting 2,500 jobs. But Rolls-Royce was also helped by a return to more normal trading conditions after the pandemic, and the massively ramped up defence spending committed to by a number of governments. (By the way, Erginbilgic’s former employer was BP.)

We need to distinguish between speed and urgency. Just moving quickly – too quickly – may feel like positive action. But it does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Being overhasty, even in this apparently fast-moving and fast-changing world, will not improve the situation.

The guru of managing change, John Kotter, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, pointed this out a while ago. His eight-step change programme, set out in his book Leading Change (1996), recognised the need for some short-term wins, but also acknowledged the need to consolidate change and “anchor new approaches”.

Most importantly, leaders need to create “a sense of urgency” if they want to manage change successfully. This phrase, “a sense of urgency”, became the title of his follow-up book, published in 2008, in which he identified the magic ingredient as “urgent patience”. This means “acting each day with a sense of urgency, but having a realistic view of time. It means recognising that five years may be needed to attain important and ambitious goals, and yet coming to work each day committed to finding every opportunity to make progress toward those goals.”

This sounds a bit like what Jim Collins, another management guru, called the “flywheel effect” in his bestseller Good to Great (2001). You put the effort in steadily, even slowly, and build up the momentum for success, which may ultimately appear to have been achieved suddenly.

Everyone is in such a rush these days. In his new book Ungovernable, former Conservative party chief whip Simon Hart describes how hard it can be doing politics now. As he told the New Statesman: “It is nigh on impossible for any prime minister to succeed in British politics at the moment… The expectation cannot be matched by delivery, however brilliant or awful people are… It worries me that we’re giving people about 15 minutes to get it right, and if they don’t get it right in 15 minutes we say, ‘We’re bored of you, you’re useless.’”

Don’t panic. There is no need to become a Fomo (fear of missing out) board – the ones who sack the chief executive after only a few bad weeks or months. Instead, keep calm and carry on, with urgent patience.