Base Power fosters a high-performance culture by displaying all North Star metrics on TVs throughout the office. This relentless transparency ensures every employee understands what matters most, creating a natural sense of focused urgency without top-down pressure.

To instill a bias for action, Chipotle CBO Chris Brandt tells his team the only two days you can't get anything done are 'yesterday or tomorrow.' This powerful framing device reframes procrastination, making 'today' the only logical option for execution and driving a culture of immediate action.

Jones Road Beauty CEO Cody Plofker suggests that half of his value is simply applying urgency across the company. This frames the CEO's primary function not as the chief strategist, but as the main catalyst for accelerating the pace of execution and empowering the team to solve problems quickly.

To overcome the paralysis of perfectionism, create systems that force action. Use techniques like 'time boxing' with hard deadlines, creating public accountability by pre-announcing launches, and generating financial stakes by pre-selling offers. These functions make backing out more difficult and uncomfortable than moving forward.

CEO declarations of "war mode" are often ineffective rhetoric. True urgency is felt in "hyperaggressive mode," a rare and unnatural state where the entire management team exhibits palpable tension and increased velocity. It's not about talk; it's a smellable, tangible increase in execution speed across all functions.

In high-stakes projects like clinical trials, waiting for a scheduled weekly meeting can be an absurdly expensive convenience. Calculating and constantly referencing the 'cost of delay'—which can be millions per day—reframes the problem, creating the urgency needed to get an immediate decision instead of waiting.

A state of "peacetime" where there are no major problems is a sign the company isn't pushing hard enough. Leaders should cultivate an internal sense of urgency or "wartime" to maintain momentum, rather than waiting for external crises to strike.

Deadlines weed out extraneous details and prevent the quest for perfection. They force decisive action, which, as leaders like Ed Catmull and Christopher Nolan have found, can accelerate the creative process rather than hinder it, forcing you to make something different, not just perfect.

To create a high-velocity culture, managers must actively pull deadlines forward. Don't just accept a proposed timeline. Ask what's blocking it, question the actual work hours required, and repeatedly challenge why it can't be done sooner.