Leading Change

by John P. Kotter

demand more agility and change-friendly organizations; more leadership from more people, and not just top management;

much greater capacity to execute bold strategic initiatives rapidly while minimizing the size and number of bumps in the road that slow you down. Speed of change is the driving force.

Whenever human communities are forced to adjust to shifting conditions, pain is ever present.

Vision plays a key role in producing useful change by helping to direct, align, and inspire actions on the part of large numbers of people.

without a vision to guide decision making, each and every choice employees face can dissolve into an interminable debate.

Complex efforts to change strategies or restructure businesses risk losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to meet and celebrate.

first four steps in the transformation process help defrost a hardened status quo.

five to seven then introduce many new practices.

corporate culture and helps make...

successful transformation is 70 to 90 percent leadership and only 10 to 30 percent management.

Visible crises can be enormously helpful in catching people’s attention and pushing up urgency levels.

helps coordinate the actions of different people,

Or they inadvertently send inconsistent messages.

“leadership by example.” The concept is simple. Words are cheap, but action is not.

empower a broad base of people to take action by removing as many barriers to the implementation

How structure can undermine vision The vision The structure • Focus on the customer • But the organization fragments resources and responsibility for products and services • Give more responsibility to lower-level employees • But there are layers of middle-level managers who second-guess and criticize employees • Increase productivity to become the low-cost producer • But huge staff groups at corporate headquaters are expensive and constantly initiate costly procedures and programs • Speed everything up • But independent silos don’t communicate and thus slow everything down

don’t recognize the kind and amount of training that will be required to help people learn those new behaviors, skills, and attitudes.

New experiences are needed to erase corrosive beliefs,

“Performance appraisal. Compensation. Promotions. Succession planning. Are they aligned with the new vision?”

purging of unnecessary interconnections can ultimately make a transformation much easier.

Culture refers to norms of behavior and shared values among a group of people. Norms of behavior are common or pervasive ways of acting that are found in a group and that persist because group members tend to behave in ways that teach these practices to new members, rewarding those who fit in and sanctioning those who do not. Shared values are important concerns and goals shared by most of the people in a group that tend to shape group behavior

wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends.

the urgency rate of the winning twenty-first-century organization will have to be medium to high all the time.

corporate cultures in the twenty-first century will have to value candid discussions

demand flatter and leaner structures along with less controlling and more risk-taking cultures.

habits that support lifelong learning • Risk taking: Willingness to push oneself out of comfort zones • Humble self-reflection: Honest assessment of successes and failures, especially the latter • Solicitation of opinions: Aggressive collection of information and ideas from others • Careful listening: Propensity to listen to others • Openness to new ideas: Willingness to view life with an open mind