Leading Change

John P. Kotter is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School whose eight-step model for leading change became the standard reference for organizational transformation. His core insight is that most change efforts fail not because the strategy is wrong but because leaders skip the human side: they don’t create enough urgency, they undercommunicate by orders of magnitude, and they declare victory too early.

Kotter’s vision rubric gives us a practical test for whether a change vision is ready to communicate. An effective vision is Imaginable (conveys a picture of the future), Desirable (appeals to stakeholders’ interests), Feasible (contains realistic goals), Focused (clear enough to guide decisions), Flexible (allows initiative and adaptation), and Clear (can be explained in five minutes). We use this rubric in the Change Vision & Strategy workshop when teams draft and pressure-test their vision statements.

His concept of the guiding coalition is equally central to our work: real change requires a network of people with enough power, credibility, and energy to drive it, not just a single executive sponsor. And his research on relentless communication grounds our insistence that communication is a loop, not a launch event.

Resources

• John P. Kotter, “Leading Change” (Harvard Business Review Press, 1996)
• John P. Kotter, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” Harvard Business Review (1995)
• Guiding Coalition — building the network that drives change
• Relentless Communication — the communication principle derived from Kotter’s research