Latest Read: Change

Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times by John P. Kotter.

John holds a MS from the MIT and PhD in Business Administration (DBA) from Harvard. He has been a long tenured professor at HBS. He co-founded Kotter International, his leadership and strategy implementation firm. Leading Change published in 1996 was named one of the most influential business books of all time by Time Magazine.

While John introduced Leading Change in 1996, this book is moving the reader to accept our the world has moved from episodic change to a state of permanent, volatile flux. This falls into perfect alignment with modern IT’s Continuous Delivery.

The focus is on behavioral science, the barrier to organizational change is not bad management, but human nature. As a result, John presents two distinct “channels” for organizations. The Survive Channel: Triggered by threats is reactionary and negatively increasing anxiety. A Thrive Channel: Triggered by opportunities will drive curiosity, collaboration, and creativity. Yet John is outlining modern corporate KPIs and quarterly targets are shutting down innovations organizations need today in order to to stay relevant.

An 8 step accelerator for organizations

John’s original 8-Step Process is now being the 8 Accelerators:

1. Create a Sense of Urgency Around a Big Opportunity: Focus on the “why” instead of a crisis. Identify a window of strategic opportunity that inspires people to move..
2. Build a Guiding Coalition: Gather a diverse group of employees from all levels and departments as your “volunteer army” who hold credibility, influence, and passion to lead the change.
3. Form a Strategic Vision: Clearly define your organization’s future that is distinct from its past. It must be a vision that is easy to communicate and must resonant.
4. Enlist a Volunteer Army: Change never works when forced down from the top. Selecting at least 10% of your workforce who are internally motivated will be the driving vision forward.
5. Enable Action by Removing Barriers: Identify friction across your organization (outdated processes, silos, and legacy mindsets) and empower your volunteers to destroy dismantle them all.
6. Generate Short-Term Wins: Document and publicize small, visible victories early on to validate the effort and keep the Survive channel from regaining control. Remember crawl, walk, run.
7. Sustain Acceleration: Use the momentum from early wins to tackle bigger, more complex organizational systems.
8. Institute Change: Ensure the new behaviors are woven into the “way we do things here” motto of the organization. This does indeed updating hiring, training, and promotion criteria to reflect the new culture.

Perhaps the most important feedback for any organization is that in order to move forward organization leaders need to support the unregulated high trust of their volunteer army.

In conclusion, today’s world demands all organizations deliver more. To be successfully leaders must embrace John’s Change lessons. I highly recommend this book because it teaches organizations how to form a strategic vision that actually enables action, allowing your organization to drive acceleration and achieve those hard-to-imagine results.

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