HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Leading Change by John P. Kotter
Loading...

Leading Change (original 1997; edition 1996)

by John P. Kotter (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,932148,506 (3.9)2
Good, clear, short. Nice framework, good examples. A little hard to apply a very $$$/business oriented perspective to higher ed, but still valuable. ( )
  bederson | Dec 17, 2020 |
English (12)  French (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (14)
Showing 12 of 12
I’m doing research for something and I was encouraged to look deeper into “change management.” It’s a management trend that’s been trending for a long time. I remember back in the 1990s hearing at almost every turn “change is the new norm.” Now, that encouragement I was given was more toward looking to the internet but I like books first. Mr. Kotter seems to be thechange management guru, and the title of this is about leading and not managing, so it seems a good starting point.

This book is both dated (1996 original pub, and this, the second edition, 2012), and still relevant: “The simple insight that management is not leadership (chapter 2) is better understood today, but not nearly as well as is needed.”

Kotter starts out with identifying eight common mistakes of organizational change. I noted of the first four:
“Error #1: Allowing Too Much Complacency”
{Organizations that rest on their laurels get left behind}
“Error #2: Failing to Create a Sufficiently Powerful Guiding Coalition”
{This is wordy, and loses its impact}
“Error #3: Underestimating the Power of Vision”
{Of the first three, I don't think this is as common. If anything, "vision" is overestimated, and overused.}
“Error #4: Undercommunicating the Vision by a Factor of 10 (or 100 or Even 1,000)”
{Okay, this aspect of vision is quite true. Overall, for any changes - even ones where the concepts are socialized well - there will be some. missing communication.}

He says “Normally, people skip steps because they are feeling pressures to produce.” I wonder if people might skip sections of this because it is can be a bit academic. Still, there is a lot of value in this.

Curated notes and highlights:

“With a strong emphasis on management but not leadership, bureaucracy and an inward focus take over.”
{Ouch. And spot on.}

“After a while, one might easily conclude that the kind of leadership that is so critical to any change can come only from a single larger-than-life person.
This is a very dangerous belief.”
[...]
No one individual, even a monarch-like CEO, is ever able to develop the right vision, communicate it to large numbers of people, eliminate all the key obstacles, generate short-term wins, lead and manage dozens of change projects, and anchor new approaches deep in the organization’s culture.”
{Single point of direction, single point of failure.}

“Characteristics of an effective vision
• Imaginable: Conveys a picture of what the future will look like
• Desirable: Appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customers, stockholders, and others who have a stake in the enterprise
• Feasible: Comprises realistic, attainable goals
• Focused: Is clear enough to provide guidance in decision making
• Flexible: Is general enough to allow individual initiative and alternative responses in light of changing conditions
• Communicable: Is easy to communicate; can be successfully explained within five minutes”
{Good summary}

“I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. ”
{And yet, authoritarian and micromanaging are ubiquitous.}

“While the [vision] statement does not give anything close to a detailed directive, it does provide focus ”
{Vision is an abstract goal of a future impact. Mission should be a definition of what is now. And an action plan gives the direction. }

“Vision creation can be difficult for at least five reasons [...] First, we have raised a number of generations of very talented people to be managers, not leaders or leader/managers, and vision is not a component of effective management. ”
{Focus is on management, not leadership. In the military, it is the opposite. In both, a mix of the two is necessary (with emphasis on leadership, of course.)}

“Key elements in the effective communication of vision
• Simplicity: All jargon and technobabble must be eliminated.
• Metaphor, analogy, and example: A verbal picture is worth a thousand words.
• Multiple forums: Big meetings and small, memos and newspapers, formal and informal interaction—all are effective for spreading the word.
• Repetition: Ideas sink in deeply only after they have been heard many times.
• Leadership by example: Behavior from important people that is inconsistent with the vision overwhelms other forms of communication.
• Explanation of seeming inconsistencies: Unaddressed inconsistencies undermine the credibility of all communication.
• Give-and-take: Two-way communication is always more powerful than one-way
communication.”

“If I hear the word empowerment one more time,” someone recently told me, “I think I’ll gag.”
A few years ago, I might have agreed with his reservations. Today, I don’t. I’m still not enthusiastic about using faddish words, but in this ever faster-moving world, I think the idea of helping more people to become more powerful is important.”
{good point}

“Short-Term Wins Aren’t Short-Term Gimmicks”
{Another good point}

“Cultural Change Comes Last, Not First”
{This is too seldom realized, recognized, and called out.}

“I can imagine a day not long from now when succession at the top of firms may no longer be an exercise in picking one person to replace another. Succession could be a process of picking at least the core of a team.
[…]
I can also imagine a day when big egos and snakes are eliminated from promotion lists, no matter how smart, clever, hard working, or well educated they”
{He has a good imagination. That is a change that will be long in coming.} ( )
  Razinha | Jul 18, 2023 |
Good, clear, short. Nice framework, good examples. A little hard to apply a very $$$/business oriented perspective to higher ed, but still valuable. ( )
  bederson | Dec 17, 2020 |
One of those books that makes much of the business world make a lot more sense when you're done. A lightbulb about successful and failed change efforts at workplaces throughout my career went off probably every two or three pages throughout the book. It has some good insights too, I think, for anyone wondering why we are doing such a crap job of transforming on a larger, societal scale to deal wtih environmental threats like climate change. ( )
  andrea_mcd | Mar 10, 2020 |
This business book was making the rounds at my company so I decided I needed to read it to find out why everyone was so excited. I found it shallow and a real waste of money. ( )
  M_Clark | Apr 26, 2016 |
I'm rating this a top choice based on the depth and practicality covered in such concise form. Kotter's model based on 8 steps make sense. He explains well why they are all necessary, and why they need an ordering in order to work. This is one to keep handy and refer back to. ( )
  jpsnow | Feb 22, 2015 |
Review: John Kotter is considered the expert on Change Management. Although, I thought his arguments for the Eight step process were valid, this book doesn't offer the information one would need to actually implement change. I thought it was more of a sales book than a functional book. The highlight of the book for me was the important difference between Leadership and Management. I hope that this information becomes more mainstream - because of the projects I've worked on, that is definitely the missing piece. ( )
  sandrafelker | Aug 10, 2010 |
Leading Change - Professor John P. Kotter
Review and Critique by Ilker Cingillioglu, 11/02/2010

In a world of rapidly changing business environment to help organizations stay ahead of the competition, world-renowned Harvard Professor John P. Kotter has conducted a substantive work that illuminated some of the most crucial factors which determine the fundamental elements of leading a successful organizational transition.

In his jargon-free example-rich book, Kotter explicates the seemingly flexible but infact a rough eight-stage change process, which he associates each of these stages with one of the eight common mistakes that hamper successful transition efforts.

The stages are:
1) Establishing a Sense of Urgency
2) Creating the Guiding Coalition
3) Developing a Vision and Strategy
4) Communicating the Change Vision
5) Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action
6) Generating Short-term Wins
7) Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
8) Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

Throughout his book Kotter provides extremely insightful and practical examples in regards to overcoming insider myopia and listening to outsiders' opinions, the importance of creating short-term wins by selecting the right people with a strong vision and effective strategy to steer others through change and how modern leadership, continuous improvement and lifelong learning are integral to drive the transition process in a socially healthy way.

Although the book presents a clear and viable guide to an organized means of leading, it still lacks some of the most important human implication and cultural factors peculiar to the new generation and that hinder organizations from successful change initiatives. For instance, Kotter takes complacency as a barrier that needs to be overcome in the first place, but in reality it is not anymore that simple to achieve it because admitting to become less complacent may mean to many leaders of tomorrow becoming less self-confident, weak and less assertive. Recent research showed that due to the soaring severity of individual competition at all levels of management, they build a propensity to put their short-term own interests before the overall long-term performance of the companies they work for. No matter how hard they may look like trying to overcome complacency, leaders of the next generation are willing to take such risks for neither themselves nor their companies, thus making complacency ever present.

Despite its phenomenal success, this book misses the whole idea of technology-based improvisational change and the increasingly evolving trend of individualism over collectivism prevalent among the leaders of the 21st century. Therefore in my opinion, this book is not anymore as relevant today as it was more than a decade ago.

Though outdated, still top quality work. Highly recommended.
  ilkcin | Feb 11, 2010 |
Great book on leadership and how to drive gchange ( )
  jtfairbro | Sep 29, 2009 |
Effective change management is one of business; holy grails and its Percival is John Kotter. Any treatise on change management will inevitably refer to this text and the program that Kotter developed is a great look at what needs to be done and the issues that usually go awry. While by no means a blueprint for success, this is an essential read for everyone who manages people. ( )
  DBJones | Aug 28, 2009 |
Kotter's eight step process is a great framework to think about how a planned change can be deployed in an existing organization. There was also a good discussion about the difference between management and leadership. One think not discussed was how the vision might be modified as the process proceeds. The material in this book is 5 stars, but the book itself has a lot of filler. I think the original HBR article was better than this book because it captured all the critical issues without the extra verbosity. ( )
  verber | Sep 5, 2008 |
Management psychobabble. ( )
  billlund | Oct 5, 2006 |
I included this book in my book: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. www.100bestbiz.com. ( )
This review has been flagged by multiple users as abuse of the terms of service and is no longer displayed (show).
  toddsattersten | May 8, 2009 |
Showing 12 of 12

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.9)
0.5
1 3
1.5
2 5
2.5 1
3 28
3.5 1
4 67
4.5 1
5 35

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,210,082 books! | Top bar: Always visible