| Good leadership advice, but narrow and out-dated |
John Kotter is a business professor at Harvard University who writes "Leading Change" as a guide to business leaders, helping them to transform their stagnant, ineffective, hierarchical companies into more effective, responsive, team-oriented ones. To help companies and leaders make this transition, he presents eight sequential steps that must be followed in order and done well.
These eight steps are:
1. Establish a sense of urgency (fight complacency)
2. Create a guiding coalition (both influential leaders and effective managers)
3. Develop a widely inspiring vision and strategy for achieving it
4. Communicate the vision, communicate the vision, and communicate the vision even more.
5. Give the employees authority to creatively experiment concerning how to best make the vision a reality
6. Make sure you point out things to celebrate as you make progress toward your goals; it rewards appropriate behavior and, besides, people need to celebrate once in a while.
7. Understand Bowen Family Systems Theory--that when you change one thing, everything else changes with it. Systemic change is difficult work that produces a whole lot of anxiety and unintended consequences.
8. Make sure that, once the changes are made, they become engrained in the new culture of he company; make them "the way we do things around here."
Kotter does get credit for being comprehensive and for being among the first to write a leadership book of this sort (copyright 1996). He appears correct in all of his arguments and this reader has difficulty finding flaws in his eight steps. He appropriately balances task-orientation and relationship-orientation and distinguishes between leading and managing. Furthermore, he is the only author I've come across that understands how Family Systems Theory plays out in an organization undergoing change.
However, the book is outdated. Newer authors like Jim Collins, John Maxwell, and Kouzes & Posner have refined Kotter's ideas and presented them in a more readable, more applicable, and more modern way (again, 1996 copyright).
Kotter limits his ideas and examples to the large, highly structured business world; other authors deliberately address leadership within smaller businesses, schools, non-profits, and other environments. Kotter writes before the internet was widely used; other books keep rapid communication advancements in mind. The obligatory quotes from people I've never heard of who praise the book say over and over again how highly readable Kotter's prose is; I found the prose dry and could cite many examples from this genre which are much more readable.
The ideas Kotter presents are not bad; in fact they're quite good and have blazed the trail for other leadership books. However, "Leading Change" could certainly use an updated edition. Other authors have taken many of Kotter's ideas, refined them, re-worked them, and present them in a manner much more helpful to a wider audience.
I neither recommend this book nor do I contest it. You would do well to read "Leading Change," but you would do better to read some of the authors listed above. |
2 Rating
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