Leading Change – John Kotter

John Kotter is the leadership and change guru at the Harvard Business School. He has written a number of seminal books – Leading Change published in 1996 sets out the 8 Step Process of Creating Major Change. This is summarised below along with the 8 errors common to failure in change programmes.

Leading Change John Kotter
Eight Step process of creating major change	8 Errors Common to Organisational Change Efforts
Establishing a sense of urgency	Allowing too much complacency
Creating a guiding coalition	Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition
Developing a vision and strategy	Underestimating the power of vision
Communicating the change vision	Undercommunicating the vision by a power of 10
Empowering broad based action	Permitting obstacles to block the new vision
Generating short term wins	Failing to create short term wins
Consolidating gains and producing more change	Declaring victory too soon
Anchoring new approaches in the culture	Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture

More details on the 8 Step process can be found  here http://kotterinternational.com/KotterPrinciples/ChangeSteps.aspx

Kotter goes on in Leading Change to compare 20^th and 21^st century organisations with reference to their structure, systems and culture. This is set out in the table below.

The Twentieth and Twenty-first century organisations compared
Twentieth century	Twenty-first century
STRUCTURE
Bureaucratic	Nonbureaucratic, with fewer rules and employees
Multi-levelled	Limited to fewer levels
Organised with the expectation that senior management will manage	Organised with the expectation that management will lead, lower level employees will manage
Characterised by policies and procedures that create many complicated internal dependencies	Characterised by policies and procedures that produce the minimal internal dependence needed to serve customers
SYSTEMS
Depend on few performance information systems	Depend on many performance information systems, providing data on customers especially
Distribute performance data to executives only	Distribute performance data widely
Offer management training and support systems to senior people only	Offer management training and support systems to many people
CULTURE
Inwardly focused	Externally orientated
Centralised	Empowering
Slow to make decisions	Quick to make decisions
Political	Open and candid
Risk averse	More risk tolerant