John P. Kotter — Jawn Lam

Works

Choosing Strategies for Change, Harvard Business Review, 1979
Managing Your Boss, Harvard Business Review, 1980
The General Managers, 1982
Power and Influence: Beyond Formal Authority, 1985
Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review, 1995
Leading Change, 1996
The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, 2002

In Tactics of Organizational Politics

Ideas

Agendas and networks. In his study of general managers, Kotter found that effective ones set agendas early and built networks of cooperative relationships with the many people their agendas depended on, inside and outside the formal chain of command, and then used those networks to get the agendas carried out.

Managing dependence. Managerial work is shaped by dependence on many people over whom the manager has little or no formal authority. Kotter argues that managers must therefore build power and influence beyond their formal authority to get things done.

The guiding coalition and short-term wins. Kotter sets out an eight-stage process for major change, built against eight common errors he observed. Its second stage is creating a guiding coalition with enough position power, expertise, credibility, and leadership that those left out cannot easily block progress; a later stage is generating visible short-term wins that sustain commitment to the effort. Caveat: The eight stages are a practitioner model drawn from Kotter's experience with change efforts.

See, feel, change. Kotter and Cohen argue that people change behavior more readily when shown something that makes them feel the problem than when given analysis alone. Their best-known example is Jon Stegner, who had one of each of the 424 kinds of gloves his company bought, each tagged with its price, piled on the boardroom table, which moved division presidents to act on purchasing.

Six approaches to resistance. Kotter and Schlesinger list six ways to deal with resistance to change: education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation and agreement, manipulation and co-optation, and explicit and implicit coercion. Each suits different situations and carries costs; negotiation offers incentives to active or potential resisters, and coercion is fast and suited to change agents with power, at the price of resentment.

Managing your boss. Gabarro and Kotter define managing your boss as consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, the boss, and the company. They treat the relationship as one of mutual dependence between two fallible people, which works when the subordinate understands the boss's goals, pressures, and working style, and is dependable and honest in return.

What it explains

Kotter's work describes how executives actually get decisions carried out: by building networks of people they depend on, assembling a coalition with enough standing to carry a change, choosing deliberately among ways to handle resistance, and managing the relationship with the boss. His books are practitioner syntheses grounded in his observation of managers.

Tactics that draw on John P. Kotter (14)

In Thinking Tools

Known for

From watching more than a hundred companies attempt major change, he listed the errors that sink transformations and the eight steps that avoid them, among them establishing urgency and forming a powerful guiding coalition of people with enough position, expertise, and credibility to lead the change.

Tools that draw on John P. Kotter (1)

Coalition Mapping