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

Kotter, John P.; Cohen, Dan S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578512549 ISBN 13: 9781578512546

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002

Synopsis

Why is organizational 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. The Heart of Change is the engaging and essential complement to John Kotter’s international bestseller Leading Change.

Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale business 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 change and looking to build their leadership skills.

Published by Harvard Business Review Press.

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 the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and is a frequent speaker at top management meetings around the world.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1578512549
• ISBN 13: 9781578512546
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190