Part 1: "What are the eight major reasons for failure?"

[Abstracted from John Kotter's book Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996, 187 pages, ISBN 0875847471]

Seems obvious: Major change will not happen easily for a long list of reasons. However, if you feel your organization to be overmanaged and underled with tendencies toward an inwardly focused culture, paralyzing bureaucracy, parochial politics, a low level of trust, lack of teamwork, arrogant attitudes, a lack of leadership in middle management, and the general human fear of the unknown, then this book might be for you.

The methods managers have used in the attempt to transform their companies into stronger competitors - total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds - routinely fall short because they fail to alter behavior. This book identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goals and shows where and how people - good people - often derail. The author reveals what he has seen, heard, experienced, and concluded in many years of working with companies to create lasting transformation. The advice is very practical.

To some degree, the downside of change is inevitable. Whenever human communities are forced to adjust to shifting conditions, pain is ever present. But a significant amount of the waste and anguish we've witnessed in the past decade is avoidable. We've made a lot of errors, the most common of which are these:

Error #1: Allowing Too Much Complacency (By far, the biggest mistake),
So…establish a sense of urgency.

Error # 2: Failing to Create a Sufficiently Powerful Guiding Coalition,
So…create one and get it to work like a team.

Error # 3: Underestimating the Power of Vision,
So…develop a vision and strategy.

Error # 4: Undercommunicating the Vision By A Factor of 10 (or 100 or Even 1,000),
So…use every vehicle possible to communicate it and have the guiding coalition role model the expected behaviors.

Error # 5: Permitting Obstacles to Block the New Vision,
So…empower broad-based action by changing systems or structures that undermine the change vision and encourage risk taking.

Error # 6: Failing to Create Short-Term Wins,
So…plan for visible improvements, create them, and visibly celebrate them.

Error # 7: Declaring Victory Too Soon,
So…consolidate gains to produce more change by leveraging increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don't fit together. Ingrain the vision through hiring and promotion processes.

Error # 8: Neglecting to Anchor Changes Firmly In The Corporate Culture (Until hew behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are always subject to degradation as soon as the pressures associated with a change effort are removed),
So…develop more and better leadership with more effective management.