Business Leadership Management

Leading Change (Summary)

by John P. Kotter

Why do 70% of all major corporate change efforts fail? It's not because of bad strategy or a lack of resources. It’s because leaders treat change like a memo. They announce a new vision and expect everyone to fall in line. But they skip the most critical step: creating a visceral, gut-level sense of urgency. One manager, tired of presenting spreadsheets about waste, simply collected the 424 different types of factory gloves his company was buying and dumped the giant, expensive pile on the boardroom table. Suddenly, the problem wasn't an abstract number; it was a mountain of waste they couldn't ignore.

Change Fails Without a Burning Platform

Before you can propose a solution, the organization must deeply feel the need for change. This means moving beyond spreadsheets and reports to create a visceral sense of urgency that makes the status quo seem more dangerous than the unknown.

A company's market share was slowly eroding, but no one seemed concerned. To galvanize his team, the CEO created a video showing their product's biggest customer happily praising a competitor's new offering. He played it at the start of every major meeting. Seeing their best client's excitement for a rival was far more powerful than any sales chart and created the urgency needed to act.

Never Declare Victory Too Soon

One of the most common and fatal errors is to relax after the first sign of progress. Real change takes years to become embedded in the company culture, and premature celebration kills the momentum needed to finish the job, allowing resistors to reclaim lost ground.

A bank successfully launched a new mobile app and saw an initial spike in user adoption. The leadership team celebrated, cut the project's funding, and reassigned key developers. Within a year, the app was buggy, outdated, and usage plummeted as employees reverted to old processes. The initial win wasn't used to drive deeper changes in customer service and internal workflows.

A Lone CEO Can't Drive Change

Major change is too complex for one person to manage. Success requires a powerful 'guiding coalition' of influential leaders from different departments who are united in their vision, trust each other, and can champion the change effort across the organization.

At one company, a new IT system failed because it was pushed solely by the CIO. The heads of Sales and Operations, who were never brought on board, quietly encouraged their teams to stick with the old system. In a successful turnaround, another company formed a task force of respected managers from every division who spent months building the new strategy together, ensuring buy-in before it was ever announced.

Change Isn't Real Until It's 'How We Do Things Here'

For a transformation to last, it must become part of the organization's DNA. This only happens after new behaviors have been proven to lead to success over time and are reinforced through promotions, new hire training, and company-wide recognition.

A company wanted to foster more innovation. The change only became real when they stopped promoting managers based on short-term profits and started promoting those who led successful, albeit initially unprofitable, experimental projects. When a manager was celebrated for a 'smart failure' that provided valuable lessons, everyone understood that the old rules no longer applied.

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