Leading Change - BookWyrm

187 pages

English language

Published Aug. 6, 1996 by Harvard Business School Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-87584-747-4

(1 review)

What will it take to bring your organization successfully into the twenty-first century? The world's foremost expert on business leadership distills twenty-five years of experience and wisdom based on lessons he has learned from scores of organizations and businesses to write this visionary guide. The result is a very personal book that is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used in the attempt to transform their companies into stronger competitors -- total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds -- routinely fall short, says Kotter, because they fail to alter behavior. Emphasizing again and again the critical need for leadership to make change happen, Leading Change provides the vicarious experience and positive role models for leaders to emulate. The book identifies an eight-step …

What will it take to bring your organization successfully into the twenty-first century? The world's foremost expert on business leadership distills twenty-five years of experience and wisdom based on lessons he has learned from scores of organizations and businesses to write this visionary guide. The result is a very personal book that is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used in the attempt to transform their companies into stronger competitors -- total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds -- routinely fall short, says Kotter, because they fail to alter behavior. Emphasizing again and again the critical need for leadership to make change happen, Leading Change provides the vicarious experience and positive role models for leaders to emulate. The book identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people -- good people -- often derail. Reading this highly personal book is like spending a day with John Kotter. It reveals what he has seen, heard, experienced, and concluded in many years of working with companies to create lasting transformation. The book is an inspirational yet practical resource for everyone who has a stake in orchestrating changes in their organization. In Leading Change we have unprecedented access to our generation's master of leadership. - Jacket flap.

2 editions

lijadora reviewed Leading Change by John P. Kotter

Review of 'Leading Change' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

If you want to change something and there's more than a few people involved this is one of the books you ought to have read. The author helped with/ watched a lot of changes in big organizations and wrote his experience down here. Neatly categorized in an 8 step process which he is convinced you need to go through when you implement a change.

I have no clue whether that 8 step approach is the only valid way to go through a change - and I didn't find any compelling evidence in the book either. A lot of what he writes makes sense, though. Like: create (real) early successes and keep em coming to get the ball rolling. Do the cultural shizzle last - it's not going to change anyhow if there's not some hard evidence that working differently actually works.

Another reason to read this is that it's considered …

If you want to change something and there's more than a few people involved this is one of the books you ought to have read. The author helped with/ watched a lot of changes in big organizations and wrote his experience down here. Neatly categorized in an 8 step process which he is convinced you need to go through when you implement a change.

I have no clue whether that 8 step approach is the only valid way to go through a change - and I didn't find any compelling evidence in the book either. A lot of what he writes makes sense, though. Like: create (real) early successes and keep em coming to get the ball rolling. Do the cultural shizzle last - it's not going to change anyhow if there's not some hard evidence that working differently actually works.

Another reason to read this is that it's considered a classic, which means that a lot of people you're working with when changing things will have read it. And a common vocabulary/ reference is handy in those situations.

Subjects

Industrial organization
Leadership
Organizational change
Strategic planning