Leading Change by John P. Kotter was published by Harvard Business School Press and is an action plan for achieving innovative changes in the workplace. Published in 1996, at the time when the 4thIndustrial Revolution was just starting to whet the imaginations of investors and all things internet related were hot, the book presents a series of steps for business leaders to help their companies successfully adapt to the changing market conditions. With the increased pressure for efficiency and adaptability to the new market conditions which have increased the speed of business and shaken much of the business environment stability that previously existed.
It is based on John P. Kotter’s extensive research experience and conversations with major business executives that provides him with the crux on which innovation initiatives either fail or flourish: Ideating, enacting and sustaining cultural change in the workplace. It is not enough, he warns, to be aware of new pressures and possibilities for constructing value – to truly adapt requires a long-term view that many managers have been taught vie years of on-the-job experience to not consider. Because of the creation of what he calls a generalized “overmanaged, under led corporate culture” he states that a different type of business figure is needed to help instigate, inspire, and incite meaningful change within companies: a leader.
There is a significant difference between management and leadership, and those that have trained and worked for years in the former typically are unaccustomed to being able to accomplish the latter. They think in terms of weeks and months rather than months and years. They are accustomed to “following the book” rather than reviewing all of the available data that ought to influence future planning, engaging stakeholders on their perspectives and then writing a book. They are typically not very charismatic, but eminently practical. What follows is the book is a detailed overview of a successful change model; explanations as to why it is so important for the steps to be followed in order; examples of effective and ineffective solutions to problems that present themselves in the process considerations to be made to ensure that the change process is fully supported by the middle and upper-level executives; and approaches to ensuring that the cultural changes promoted are sticky.
- Establishing a Sense of Urgency
- Creatindg the Guiding Coalition
- Developing a Vision and Strategy
- Communicating the Change Vision
- Empowering Broad-Based Action
- Generating Short-Term Wins
- Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
- Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture
Common errors to organizational efforts include the following: allowing too much complacency, failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition; underestimating the power of vision; under-communicating the vision; 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. The appearance of these errors within the change effort has serious consequences. New strategies aren’t implemented well; acquisitions don’t achieve expected synergies; re-engineering takes too long and costs too much; downsizing doesn’t get costs under control; quality programs don’t deliver hoped-for results. Kotter also explains how it is that such process deformations can occur and accrues and how to watch out for them.
For instance, if there are no short-term wins built into the process it is likely that it will be abandoned. New forms of business intelligence guiding strategy may be ignored if there are secular reasons for non-performance that are not addressed by management. Interdependent processes that have been marked for change may seem excessive and leads to such an escalation that employees push back. Because of this, it is of the utmost importance that an effective innovation vision not just be presented, but also to be explained, talked about when appropriate in meetings by management, referred to when discussing the rationale behind a change in process that is not always adhered too, etc. These and more examples provide the basis for the specific order of the process described within the book and how to avoid getting off course. Following these steps allows a leader to truly anchor in the novel and innovative approach into the company culture.
Kotter’s depiction of an effective vision is it’s containing the following characteristics:
Imaginable: Conveys a picture of what the future will look like
Desirable: Appeals to the long-term interests of employees, customer, 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.
This model is somewhat similar to Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick model of marketing – Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories – and similarly emphasizes the importance of interpersonal qualities to gaining buy-in by those involved in the innovation-change process. Some people that don’t follow the new direction will have to be let go, especially those with positions of power whose hypocrisy (saying that they’re following the new direction but actually not) causes friction. The inverse can be said of those that are lone leaders working to assisting in a company’s innovation change project. Kotter tells a story about a General Motors division that had been a highly effective leader of a transformation program, but how after step 7 – Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change – he was immediately fired so that step 8 – Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture – didn’t have a sufficient amount of time to express itself. The result, within 6 months everything went back to the way it was and the gains that were starting to be seen were lost – along with the momentum in the right direction. Only after three stumbling quarters went on did the managers start to admit that they had slipped in their adherence to the structure that was to lead them to success!
Kotter’s cogent and informed book ends with a section that reflections on the modern business world with words that I resonated with given that I’m reading this as part of my doctorate program in Innovation and Technology Management at UPB. The last chapter of the book is titled “Leadership and Lifelong Learning” and in it, he describes how the prototype of the 20th to mid 21st century executive is no longer applicable to the modern business world. He shares several anecdotes of entrepreneurs and middle managers that he’s met who, with the combination of inborn ambition and helpful connections and executives who were able to radically scale their leadership skills and thus radically increase the competitive capacity of the businesses that they were involved with. Their willingness to seek new challenges and reflect honestly on their successes and failures leads not only to the expected knowledge and leadership skill increased but an uncanny ability to deal with an increasingly competitive and fast-moving economic environment. Given that this path and those goals were what motivated me to enroll in the program I’m now in, it was nice to read that someone like Kotter in a way confirmed that I was talking the best path to master the skills needed for the age of the 4th industrial revolution.
