I was co-CEO of a $100 million company. Here’s how my sense of urgency nearly killed it

Over the course of a long career, I’ve made my share of mistakes, but the dumbest and most damaging ones have always been driven by urgency. Whenever I convinced myself that an opportunity was so great I had to “strike while the iron is hot,” boneheaded decisions inevitably followed, usually ending in some crushing failure. Of course, nobody ever tells you that because “creating a sense of urgency” is supposed to be a good thing. It leads to action, and action feels good. Deliberation, on the other hand, can feel frustrating and, let’s face it, boring. If you can create urgency, you can make things happen. The problem is that the things you make happen are often the wrong ones. That was certainly true of the worst mistake I ever took part in. In 2007, our company in Kyiv hatched a plan to dominate Ukrainian-language media. At the time, there were no significant competitors, despite credible research suggesting substantial unmet demand. What looked like a once-in-a-generation opportunity turned into a catastrophe. It nearly killed the company. The emergence of an idea Our company, KP Media, was founded in 1995 by Jed Sunden, a 25-year-old native of Brooklyn. It started with the Kyi…