Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Leading Change, With a New Preface by the Author

Top positive review

Change - Ya Gotta Love It. REALLY.

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2011

What does it mean to be a change leader? In times of fiscal upheaval, can a state agency stay true to its mission and vision? Or, must these be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency to the (presumably) lean God of Economy? These are the challenges that confront our elected representatives, agencies that serve the public, unions that represent the workforce, and their constituencies.

In "Leading Change," John Kotter reveals his Eight-Stage Process of Creating Major Change:

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

In Kotter's experience, neglecting any one stage undermines and imperils the entire change effort.

So it is clear that change is coming. It always does. Particular change can be envisioned in an instant but implementation can take some time. This is especially true in large, complex organizations like government bureaucracies, with highly interdependent structures and systems. Serving the public is a process and jobs are maintained to provide the service. Nearly every process in one system is connected to many other systems, and one change will, of necessity, affect changes to hundreds or thousands of processes. To say that change requires hard work and sacrifice in this environment is an understatement.

Change in a government bureaucracy requires a seismic shift in thinking by those who have been working at the same agency for decades, especially those who really believe they have made a difference for the public good. "We have always done it this way so why change now?" Their contributions provide valuable lessons but time marches on. Not only are policies and procedures not cast in stone, but future generations deserve the right to have them evolve. Whether they evolve for the better -or not--is the responsibility of the change agent... basically, you and I.

By definition, government services "serve" the public. The way government serves the public today could not have been envisaged at its founding. America has had some time to think about and see some good ideas become reality. We have codified them, managed them, regulated them, raised revenue from them, underwritten, audited, overseen the audit, re-codified, re-managed, re-regulated, created increasingly complex financing mechanisms, then audited everything again.... It is only natural that before long, the original idea... the "mission" and "vision" becomes lost in the risk averting, litigious-avoiding (though interconnected) world of bureaucratic government. How do you empower interdependent agencies with different functional missions to work seamlessly together? What can a workforce do when it is saddled with legally mandated interconnected systems that do not fulfill the mission or vision of the agency but are relics of an earlier era, or simply symptoms of jurisdictional overreach?

For change to really happen and take hold in a governmental bureaucracy, with organizational structures and personnel performing different functions and serving different (sometimes opposing) constituencies, and systems of supports and services serving a large and growing base of populations, the change must produce benefits and personal satisfactions that are superior to the way things are today.

Today it will take more than the desire to "do more with less," or even to "do more, better." Indeed, the organizational culture itself must be changed. Purging unnecessary interconnections can ultimately make a transformation not only possible, but easier. It may not be necessary to consolidate agencies when it would be more efficient to coordinate them instead. Streamline procedures and approval processes by putting systems in place that satisfy regulatory requirements and align with the agency's mission. Government and unions can be powerful allies to responsibly empower a highly trained public workforce. The wins must be real, and they must come soon. Paraphrasing Kotter, "Truly adaptive governmental bodies with adaptive cultures are awesome competitive machines."

At a visceral level, you have to appreciate change, respect it, embrace it... lead it. "Leading Change" reminds us that change starts with you and me.

4 people found this helpful

Top critical review

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Elizabeth Pyatt

Great Vision, but Needed More Details

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2015

I like that the book focuses on the need to change the culture of an entire organization in order for a change to be made permanent. In fact. my favorite chapter was the last chapter on how anyone can (and should) learn leadership skills in the 21st century workplace. It does provide a basic outline of how to implement a change strategy, but unfortunately, the devil is, as they say, in the details and I was disappointed in how few details were provided in implementing the different change strategies. For instance, I think many modern leaders appreciate the need to empower employees, but rarely have the toolset to overcome traditional hierarchies enough to make it a reality. FWIW - I think changing cultures really require better understanding of basic anthropology, including social network interactions. I also felt that the initial strategy of creating urgency could feel arbitrary, and that arbitrary feeling could hinder change.

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From the United States

William Cooke

Change - Ya Gotta Love It. REALLY.

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2011

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4 people found this helpful

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Bill Pinches

Highly readable, useful, and even inspiring

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2006

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What happens when an organization needs to change (if it hopes to be successful in the future) but hasn't put much thought into what the process of change itself looks like? More than likely: failure.

John Kotter outlines here a critical difference between change efforts that have been successful, compared to change efforts that have failed. Drawing on decades' worth of experience consulting with firms and coaching leaders, and attentive to ever-increasing globalization of markets and competition, Kotter offers an eight-stage change process. The eight 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 broad-based action
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture

Successful change, Kotter argues, "is 70 to 90 percent leadership and only 10 to 30 percent management. Yet for historical reasons, many organizations today don't have much leadership." Kotter articulates what effective leadership -- not management -- actually looks like.

Kotter provides a helpful, clear, and concise chapter devoted to each of the eight stages. He articulates precisely what is needed at each critical moment in the transformation process. He provides numerous examples of what happens when any stage is ignored (basically, he suggests that to ignore any of the eight stages will likely lead to failure). Specific guidance and steps are offered at every point along the way. A useful summary of the whole process is provided on page 21.

The final couple chapters provide a glimpse into the organizations and leaders of the future. "The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. . . . The typical twentieth-century organization has not operated well in a rapidly changing environment. . . . If environmental continues to increase, as most people now predict, the standard organization of the twentieth century will likely become a dinosaur." The winning enterprise of the twenty-first century will have a persistent sense of urgency, teamwork at the top, people who can create and communicate vision, broad-based empowerment, delegated management for excellent short-term performance, no unnecessary interdependence, and an adaptive corporate culture. Leaders of the future are going to be people with high standards and a strong willingness to learn. Arguing that leadership traits can be learned, Kotter provides examples of people he has known over an extended period of time who once upon a time showed little promise, but who developed superlative leadership skills and have become highly effective, successful, influential leaders. Just as organizations need to continue to continue to change and grow, so too will organizations' future leaders.

Overall, this is a highly readable, useful book. It is obviously useful for leaders in the corporate world. I would argue that it is also highly useful for leaders in ANY organization that is trying to thrive in the twenty-first century. I wish I had read it years ago!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Classic on change management - pretty good

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2013

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Leading Change from Kotter is one of the classics on modern change management and it is a pretty good book. Though, definitively not perfect and it does, in my opinion, have a bit a 'traditional management' taste to it. But, well, as that is probably practices in the majority of the companies, I can't blame this book for it.

Leading change is fairly short, a bit less than 200 pages. It consists of 3 different parts: 1) The change problem and its solution (or it could be called "overview"), 2) The eight-stage process, 3) Implication for the twenty-first century.

The first part consists of 2 small chapters. The first cover why organizations fail with their change efforts and it provides eight mistakes (which is basically the reverse of his later proposal). In the second chapter, Kotter introduces his 8-step change process for managing change in an organization.

The eight steps are also the eight chapters of part 2. They are:

- Establish a Sense of Urgency
- Creating a Guiding Coalition
- Developer a Vision and Strategy
- Communicating the Change Vision
- Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action
- Generating Short-Term Wins
- Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
- Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture.

Each of the chapters in Part 2 describe the change step, why it is needed and give some advise and stories about the change.

The third and last chapter speculated about the future and how change is becoming more and more important.

All in all, the book was actually pretty good (better than I had expected, as I was familiar with the basic content already). It is well-written and in quite a convincing way. I did get uncomfortable at times, these were mainly about 3 assumptions that I felt throughout the book. 1) The enormous focus on 'leadership' which, I believe, somewhat misses the point of building an environment in which all people flourish (and yes, you might say the leader does it, but why not all people? Isn't it just caring?). 2) A lot of focus on "top-down" change rather than grass-roots change and with it a lot of focus on traditional management roles, and 3) A lot of focus on BIG change efforts over many small ones (many small ones is more a Kaizen spirit). It felt in line with the "big project" and "re-engineering" thinking rather than the view of gradual change. Anyways, all three of these are to be expected and as the book has a clear focus/audience, it doesn't matter too much.

Thus, a good book on traditional change management and worst reading from that perspective. It wasn't an *aha* book for me, it was just good. For that reason, I'll stick with 4 stars. Pretty good.

2 people found this helpful

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Cade

There's a reason this book is internationally recognized and known amongst organization leaders.

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2023

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This book came in perfect conditions! No issues at all with the shipping. Book came exactly as expected for a new book.

Helpful

Bruce Pharr

The One Constant Is Change

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2010

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"By any objective measure, the amount of significant, often traumatic, change in organizations has grown tremendously over the past two decades. Although some people predict that most of the reengineering, restrategizing, mergers, downsizing, quality efforts, and cultural renewal projects will soon disappear, I think that is unlikely."

John P. Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School, opens his book, "Leading Change," with this statement. In the book, he provides answers to two questions: Why do so many companies fail in their attempts to change, and is there a process to improve the probability of successful change?

As to the first question, Professor Kotter states that, "The combination of cultures that resist change and managers who have not been taught how to create change is lethal." He supplies brief descriptions of eight common mistakes that can cause an organization to fail in its transformation efforts.

* Allowing too much complacency
* Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition
* Underestimating the power of vision
* Undercommunicating the vision by a factor of 10 (or 100 or even 1,000)
* Permitting obstacles to block the new vision
* Failing to create short-term wins
* Declaring victory too soon
* Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture

But he spends most of the book describing an eight-step process that is the antithesis of the common mistakes.

* Establishing a sense of urgency
* Creating the guiding coalition
* Developing a vision and strategy
* Communicating the change vision
* Empowering the employees for broad-based action
* Generating short-term wins
* Consolidating gains and producing more change
* Anchoring new approaches in the culture

He concludes the book by speculating on the characteristics of organizations prepared to successfully face the future, and the relationship of lifelong learning and leadership skills that define the individual's capacity to succeed in the future.

The book evolved from an article entitled, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," that was published in the March-April 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review. Unlike many books that are expanded from articles through redundancy or by adding content of questionable value, Leading Change succinctly delivers all of this information in 186 pages that should be required reading for anyone in a position of change leadership.

One person found this helpful

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O. Halabieh

Change is here to stay

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2010

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In this book, the author discusses in detail an eight-stage process of creating major changes. The steps are as follows: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering broad-based action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gain and producing more change, and finally anchoring new approaches in the culture. Anyone who has dealt with change can identify some of the stages outlined. The challenge is to work through them methodically and ensuring that each stage is successful to build a lasting change on a solid foundation. From my experience, numerous changes attempt to fast-track or skip some of these stages. While on the short term, this may not seem like an issue, sooner or later the change ultimately fails to achieve the desired outcome. In addition, despite that big changes take time to complete, it is vital to build and achieve small wins to maintain the change momentum. John offers extensive examples from his professional career, through which he illustrates both successful and unsuccessful changes. One of the pivotal points he makes is around leadership and management, what their role is in the change and the differences between them. For a change to succeed both strong leaders and strong managers are needed. Overall a very interesting read for anyone leading a major project/change initiative. I will conclude from a quote from the last chapter, which I particularly enjoyed reading on personal development and the concept of competitive capacity: "In attempting to explain why most (students of HBS) were doing well in their careers...I found the two elements stood out: competitive drive and lifelong learning." Competitive drive is characterized by a level of standards, a desire to do well and self-confidence in competitive situations. Lifelong learning is characterized by a willingness to seek new challenges, and a willingness to reflect honestly on success and failures.

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Gregory Gray

Fantastic work

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2022

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The writing of Kotter, if you follow him, is incredible in the areas of leadership and change. This book specifically is an easy read and hits home on so many perspectives about leading change. It is a refreshing read and one all consultants and coaches should read, along with clients.

Helpful

Paolo & Francesca

Inspiring for change agents

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2013

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I am a sustainability professional who works to help institutions become more sustainable and better stewards of the environment. Because of the nature of my work, I am always trying to coax, create, inspire, and implement change. After years of learning about the technical knowledge of what to do and how to do it, this is the most helpful book of all which deals with the sequence of implementing change. When you are dealing with other people or a large organization, you cannot just start changing things left and right. You need to establish a foundation, get buy in, and leverage small changes into bigger changes. Where do you start? Who do you talk to? What do you do first? What do you do next? This book shows you what to do first, second, and third in the 8 step process to change. It shows the difference of being a leader rather than a manager or worker. A leader's most important task is to have vision and help others buy into that vision. The ability to implement and deep technical knowledge is useless unless there is support for change and a structure that allows for it to happen.
I like that Kotter's book lays out clearly an architecture for change. While the book was short, didn't have many examples or diverse applications (such as outside of the corporate environment), I appreciate its conciseness, which allows you to spend more time thinking about how the principles apply to your own situation. It can be skimmed easily and the charts and summaries at the end of each chapter cogently summarize the main points of each chapter. I highly recommend this book for all leaders that try to create change.

10 people found this helpful

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Phillip DeVries

Great Insights into Change and Leadership

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2021

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This was a very enjoyable business book to read. It was short and concise, which is a breath of fresh air for business books. Some books are very repetitive and filled with examples which can be exhausting to read as the same points are made over and over again. In this book, the points are succinct and the examples simple. The focus is on the need for leadership, the steps for change, and the hard work needed to go through those steps. No sugar coating here!

I think this is a great book for anyone working in a corporate environment. Leaders about to embark on a large change effort or those at any level who are in the middle of such change.

I would recommend this book because it is honest, straightforward and thought provoking. It is an easy and interesting read.

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Great Ideas, Some More Examples Would Have Helped

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2021

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“Leading Change” by John Kotter is one of the most popular books on the change management process--and, despite some flaws, there are good reasons for this. Kotter’s over the target with his eight-step change process and in listing out the mistakes made in the change process. But with less than 200 pages, Kotter could have included more, such as, like other reviewers have noted, case studies since his example are often vague and only quickly touched on. Still, this is a good overview for leaders wanting to know more about the change process. Recommended.

2 people found this helpful

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