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John P. Kotter's Leading Change

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John P. Kotter is Professor of the Chair of Leadership named after Konosuke Matsushita at the Harvard Business School. In 1980, at the age of thirty-three, he became one of the youngest full-time teachers at Harvard University. He is the author of the bestsellers: The General Managers (1982), The Leadership Factor (1987), Leading Change (1996), and some others, as well as two tutorials on Leadership (1991) and Corporate Culture (1993) for leaders and educational CD-ROM on initiation changes (1997). The total circulation of Harvard Business Review with his articles was 1.5 million. Professor Kotter won the Smith & Knisely Award for New Perspectives in Business Leadership and McKinsey for Best Publication in Harvard Business Review. He currently …show more content…

Kotter proposed a sequence of stages of organizational change, including suggesting to people the need for change, creating a team of reformers, developing and promoting a new vision for the prospects of future markets, and determining the strategy for their conquest, as well as providing employees with the conditions for broad participation in transformations. Kotter attaches great importance to obtaining quick results, consolidating successes for deepening the process of change, and rooting changes in corporate culture. For the first time, Kotter described the eight-step method in the article Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, published in 1995 in HBR, where he managed to intelligibly and consistently formulate the sequence in eight steps and basic errors of change management (Kotter 2007). Although Kotter's theory is just a theory and does not guarantee unavoidable success, at the moment, it is the most accurate and perfect description of the steps necessary for successful implementation of the …show more content…

Make sure the changes are necessary. The first and, perhaps, the most serious obstacle on the way to change is the inertia of the personnel. If employees are satisfied with the current state of affairs, it is almost impossible to convince them that something needs to be changed. To achieve this understanding, one needs great management skills. Such 'calmness' can be a consequence of the fact that the crisis has not yet begun to explicitly inform about itself. Its signs at the initial stage can be discerned only by an experienced analyst.
Therefore, it is not easy to stir up staff 'hypnotized' by the illusion of well-being. Kotter offers the following techniques. 1. Eradication of elements of extravagance (for example, the cancellation of any benefits). 2. Establishment of higher 'bars' in the work of employees. 3. Review of mechanisms for measuring the effectiveness of employees. 4. Stimulation of collective discussion of problems.
Step 2. Form teams of changes. The team to promote change must be formed in the earliest phases of organizational change. To do this, it is necessary to identify employees who are most loyal to changes, having management skills and a similar vision for the

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