Leading Change Why Transformation Efforts Fail
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CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter
FROM THE JANUARY 2007 ISSUE
WHAT TO READ NEXT
What Every CEO Should Know About Creating
New Businesses
4 Things You Thought Were True About
Managing Millennials
The Worst Failure of All Is Wasting a Failure
Editor’s Note: Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader—no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the business. Thus,
VIEW MORE FROM THE
leading change is both absolutely essential and incredibly difficult.
January 2007 Issue
Perhaps nobody understands the anatomy of organizational change better than retired Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter. This article, originally published in the spring of 1995, previewed Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change. It outlines eight critical success factors—from establishing a sense of extraordinary urgency, to creating short-term wins, to changing the culture (“the way we do things around here”). It will feel familiar when you read it, in part because Kotter’s vocabulary has entered the lexicon and in part because it contains the kind of home truths that we recognize, immediately, as if we’d always known them. A decade later, his work on leading change remains definitive.
O
ver the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money
(Bristol-Myers Squibb). These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing,
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter
FROM THE JANUARY 2007 ISSUE
WHAT TO READ NEXT
What Every CEO Should Know About Creating
New Businesses
4 Things You Thought Were True About
Managing Millennials
The Worst Failure of All Is Wasting a Failure
Editor’s Note: Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader—no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the business. Thus,
VIEW MORE FROM THE
leading change is both absolutely essential and incredibly difficult.
January 2007 Issue
Perhaps nobody understands the anatomy of organizational change better than retired Harvard Business School professor John P. Kotter. This article, originally published in the spring of 1995, previewed Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change. It outlines eight critical success factors—from establishing a sense of extraordinary urgency, to creating short-term wins, to changing the culture (“the way we do things around here”). It will feel familiar when you read it, in part because Kotter’s vocabulary has entered the lexicon and in part because it contains the kind of home truths that we recognize, immediately, as if we’d always known them. A decade later, his work on leading change remains definitive.
O
ver the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money
(Bristol-Myers Squibb). These efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, rightsizing,