The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations - Hardcover

Kotter, John P.; Cohen, Dan S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1422187330 ISBN 13: 9781422187333

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012

Synopsis

Moving beyond the process of change

Why is change so hard? Because in order to make any transformation successful, you must change more than just the structure and operations of an organization you need to change people’s behavior. And that is never easy.

The Heart of Change is your guide to helping people think and feel differently in order to meet your shared goals. According to bestselling author and renowned leadership expert John Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen, this focus on connecting with people’s emotions is what will spark the behavior change and actions that lead to success. Now freshly designed, The Heart of Change is the engaging and essential complement to Kotter’s worldwide bestseller Leading Change.

Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale change can work. With real-life stories of people in organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and activated to overcome obstacles to change and produce spectacular results. Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to get buy-in from their teams instead of creatively showing or doing something that appeals to their emotions and inspires them to spring into action. They call this the see-feel-change dynamic, and it is crucial for the success of any true organizational transformation.

Refreshingly clear and eminently practical, The Heart of Change is required reading for anyone facing the challenges inherent in leading change.

About this title

Review:

The Heart of Change is the follow-up to John Kotter's enormously popular book Leading Change, in which he outlines a framework for implementing change that sidesteps many of the pitfalls common to organizations looking to turn themselves around. The essence of Kotter's message is this: the reason so many change initiatives fail is that they rely too much on "data gathering, analysis, report writing, and presentations" instead of a more creative approach aimed at grabbing the "feelings that motivate useful action." In The Heart of Change, Kotter, with the help of Dan Cohen, a partner at Deloitte Consulting, shows how his eight-step approach has worked at over 100 organizations. In just about every case, change happened because the players were led to "see" and "feel" the change. In one example, a sales representative underscores a sense of urgency to change a manufacturing process by showing a videotaped interview with an unhappy customer; in another, a purchasing manager makes his point to senior management about corporate waste by displaying on the company's boardroom table the 424 different kinds of gloves that the company had procured through different vendors at vastly different prices. Well written and loaded with real-life examples and practical advice, The Heart of Change towers over other change-management titles. Managers and employees at organizations both big and small will find much to draw from. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

About the Author:

John P. Kotter is internationally regarded as the foremost authority on the topics of leadership and change. His is the premier voice on how the best organizations achieve successful transformations. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School and is cofounder of Kotter International, a leadership organization that helps Global 5000 company leaders accelerate the implementation of their most critical strategies and lead change in a complex, fast-moving business environment. John Kotter has authored eighteen books, twelve of them bestsellers. His works have been printed in over 150 foreign-language editions.

Dan S. Cohen is the CEO of Stuart Advisory Services Group and a retired partner of Deloitte Consulting LLP. He focuses on large-scale organizational transformation and strategic change, and has over thirty-five years of experience consulting to and working in industry. During his fifteen years at Deloitte, Cohen developed the firm’s first Global Change Leadership methodology and was the lead architect in the design of Deloitte’s Strategic Change methodology. In addition to his consulting work, Cohen has lectured on organizational behavior at Ohio State University, Miami University, the University of Detroit, and Southern Methodist University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1422187330
• ISBN 13: 9781422187333
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224