Book Review: Leading Change by John P. Kotter Essay

Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Harvard Business School Press, 1996.In light of the increasing rate of spay in the business organization environment due to factors such as technological advances and globalization, the need to be open to make successful transformations within an organization becomes more imperative than ever before. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step guide for making successful organization changes. These eight steps stem from subjugateing common mistakes make during organizational change efforts seen in the knightly , such as too much complacency failing to create a powerful guiding coalition underestimating the power of vision under-communicating the vision permitting obstacles to gourmandize a new vision failing to create short term wins declaring a victory too soon and neglecting to secure changes firmly into the organizational culture.To avoid these mistakes, draws of an organization requiring changes should consider the following steps 1. Establishing a sense of urgency2. Creating a guiding coalition3. Developing a vision and dodge4. Communicating the change vision5. Empowering broad-based action6. Generating short-term wins7. Consolidating gains and producing more change8. Anchoring new approaches into the cultureIn establishing a sense of urgency , it is hoped that a leader of change give be able to direct stakeholders drive towards a common purpose and reducecomplacency. Common causes of complacency include the absence of a crisis, low overall performance standards, wrong performance measurement indexes, too much happy talk from perplexity, and lack of sufficient performance feedback from external sources. It is suggested that a leader creates a sense of purpose allowing weaknesses to be exposed, setting performance targets that atomic number 18 too high, analyze current opportunities and highlight the organizations inability to pursue them, and cut-down on the happy talk and listen to disgruntled customers .Very often, committees of employees devoted to making organizational change are ineffectual because they do not have the every influential, elderly managers who can make changes happen and reinforce the urgency of the committees purpose to all levels. Kotter suggests careful selection of committee members to include senior management and influential people, with care taken to avoid those employees he labels egos and snakes (i.e. those employees whose egos may take precedence over the committees agenda and those people who may undermine the religious belief necessary to build strong committee relationships)By developing a vision, a leader creates a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future. (p. 68) It not only clarifies direction but helps in motivating those people who ordain be affected and/or implementing change. Kotter gives examples of good and bad visions and suggests that a perfect vision should be in troduce and simple enough to explain within vanadium minutes. A vision should also inspire people to force people bulge of their comfort zones, it should be challenging but attainable, and usually takes advantage of original trends such as globalization or technological changes.In communicating the change vision, Kotter argues that in this day of information overload, talk of vision and strategy takes up only a small fraction of employee time and the ideas are often lost. Using analogies, repetition and the use of multiple forums for conveying change vision will help employees to understand and remember the ideas. Clear concise language is a must.To empower employees for broad-based action enables much more flexibility within an organization to oblige to a changing environment. Barrier to empowerment however exist in i) the organizational structure w here(predicate) resources are so fragmented that timely delivery of objectives is well-nigh impossible , ii) the skills of employee s, iii) systems of the organization such as HR systems which advocate antiquated measures of performance which contradict new changes, iv) supervisors who are reluctant to change from the traditional command-and-control manner of management.Despite the long-term nature of many organizational changes, Kotter suggests that the generation of short-term wins is of utmost importance and not necessarily at the expense of long-term benefits. He cites examples of CEOs who have implemented long term change initiatives but the failure to create short-term wins and tangible benefits made stakeholders impatient resulting in disenchantment. He reinforces the clear difference between management and leadership and their importance in the pursuit of short-term and long term goals (leadership being more long-term vision and strategy-oriented, management being more concerned with the pursuit goals in the immediate future). The achievement of short-term goals not only reinforces that scarifies made f or long-term goal achievement are paying off. They also help to reward change agents and undermine cynics/anchors to change, they build momentum and can help fine-tune vision and strategies.After a short-term win, Kotter warns that it is all too tempting to relax and even regress in some cases back to old ways. All momentum of change is lost. To be able to consolidate gains and keep producing more change, he suggests that management increase urgency levels, and learn to understand and appreciate that interdependencies with in the organization dictate that when changes are made in one area, they often require further changes to be made in other areas or departments.Once changes have been made, it is then important to anchor them into the corporate culture. It is observed that culture is not easily manipulated so this should be done when all changes have been made. Changing the way we dothings around here is imperative so that regression to old practices is not experienced.To summariz e, Kotter reinforces that an increasingly changing business environment is forcing decisions to be made quicker and organizations to become more waxy to external changes than ever before. Only with increased flexibility, teamwork and leaner organizations can a leader ever hope to make changes in response to these pressure. The leadership qualities of the change agents very important because they set the vision for others to follow. The importance of continual learning is also emphasized because leaders who are constantly changing themselves and going out of their comfort zones arguably are more able to leave those comfort zones in order to adapt to a changing environment.