CRITICAL THINKING


KOTTER AT A GLANCE


Kotter graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1968 and an M.S. in management in 1970. He then completed his Doctor of Business Administration in 1972 at Harvard Business School and joined the faculty. In 1981, at age 33, he received tenure and a full professorship, and was later named the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership. Kotter retired as a full-time faculty member from Harvard in 2001. In 2008, he co-founded Kotter International. (Among Kotter International’s early clients was the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 2009. As the war in Afghanistan intensified, Kotter helped the center create a strategy to successfully process a backlog of pilots through the training program.)


Kotter first received widespread attention in the spring of 1995, when his article, “Leading Change: Why Trans- formation Efforts Fail,” was published in the Harvard Business Review. In very short order, the article jumped to the top of the Review’s reprint list.


A book, “Leading Change,” followed the next year, becoming an international best-seller. In 2011, Time magazine said “Leading Change” was one of the 25 most influential business management books ever writ- ten. In “Leading Change,” Kotter devised an eight-step process for change management and leadership (since updated in his 2014 book, “Accelerate”):


• Create a sense of urgency: Help others see the need for change through a bold, aspirational opportunity statement that communicates the importance of acting immediately.


• Build a guiding coalition: A volunteer army needs a coalition of effective people—born of its own ranks—to guide it, coordinate it and communicate its activities.


• Form a strategic vision and initiatives: Clarify how the future will be different from the past and how you can make that future a reality through initiatives linked directly to the vision.


• Enlist a volunteer army: Large-scale change can occur only when massive numbers of people rally around a common opportunity. They must be bought- in and urgent to drive change—moving in the same direction.


• Enable action by removing barriers: Removing inef- ficient processes and hierarchies, for example, provides the freedom necessary to work across silos and generate real impact.


• Generate short-term wins: Wins are the molecules of results. They must be recognized, collected and communicated—early and often—to track progress and energize volunteers to persist.


• Sustain acceleration: Press harder after the first successes. Your increasing credibility can improve systems, structures and policies. Be relentless with initiating change after change until the vision is a reality.


• Institute change: Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, making sure they continue until they become strong enough to replace old habits.


“A vision is not an operating plan.”


https://asc.ar my.mil 73


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