Sometimes it doesn't hurt to talk around a little and see what lights people's eyes up and what makes them cloud over.
— John P. Kotter
I am often asked about the difference between 'change management' and 'change leadership,' and whether it's just a matter of semantics. These terms are not interchangeable.
Globalization is going to bring us closer and closer together across nations and technology you can't stop.
I am always looking for stories that will shed light on how companies define themselves - for better or for worse. When shared with others, such stories can have an enormous impact on how well we move forward in the changing world around us.
The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.
If people think the boss is manipulating them to get them to work harder, it backfires.
True urgent leadership doesn't drain people. It does the opposite. It energizes them. It makes them feel excited.
Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.
We are always creating new tools and techniques to help people, but the fundamental framework is remarkably resilient, which means it must have something to do with the nature of organizations or human nature.
Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.
In an ever changing world, you never learn it all, even if you keep growing into your 90s.
The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.
In terms of getting people to experiment more and take more risk, there are at least three things that immediately come to my mind. Number one, of course, is role-modeling it yourself. Number two is, when people take intelligent, smart risks and yet it doesn't work out, not shooting them. And number three, being honest with yourself.
All organizations start with a structure that looks like a dynamic solar system. They can be very fast, agile. They attract people who play around with crazy ideas.
Urgency is unbelievably important when you're talking about, not little changes, but big changes.
It's very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different. And whenever you require people to do something different, you're talking about change.
Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.
At any one time the world has a very limited number of Steve Jobs or Winston Churchills or Thomas Watson the firsts. These are wonderful people and we can learn much from them, but praying for a few more of them to solve the world's problems is not a great idea.
Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats?
The world has 6 billion people and counting. We need to help 500 million people become better leaders so that billions can benefit.
We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.
I'm impatient. Typically people think they know all about change and don't need help. Their approach tends to be more management-oriented than leadership-oriented. It's very frustrating.
We worry about appearing awkward in a presentation. But up to a point, most people seem to feel more comfortable with less-than-perfect speaking abilities. It makes the speaker more human - and more vulnerable, meaning he is less likely to attack our decisions or beliefs.
Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.
Many years ago, I think I got my first insight on how an incredibly diverse team can work together and do astonishing things, and not just misunderstand each other and fight.
Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there.
Every organization goes through a lifecycle where they eventually lose their initial speed or agility at a strategic level.
Innovation is kind of a sub-piece of change.
More and more I'm finding that I'm reading history, I'm reading biography, I'm reading autobiography for a sense of people who've been able to provide leadership. I don't read leadership books anymore.
Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.
Leadership is always about change: it's not about mobilising people to do what they've always done well to continue to do it well.
If you're overbooked, you can't manage pressing problems or even recognize they're pressing until too late.
Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.
Tradition is a very powerful force.
Low lights signal to our senses that the workday may be over and it's time for sleep, making it hard for an audience to pay careful attention. When we stand behind a big wooden podium, it can feel as if there's a shield between us and the audience.
Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.
A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.
If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.
The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.
