John P. Kotter

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About John P. Kotter
Regarded by many as the authority on leadership and change, John P. Kotter is a New York Times best-selling author, award winning business and management thought leader, business entrepreneur, inspirational speaker and Harvard Professor. His ideas, books, speeches, and company, Kotter International, have helped mobilize people around the world to better lead organizations, and their own lives, in an era of increasingly rapid change.
Dr. Kotter’s MIT and Harvard education laid the foundation for his life-long passion for educating, motivating, and helping people. He became a member of the Harvard Business School faculty in 1972. By 1980, at the age of 33, Kotter was given tenure and a full Professorship – at the time, the youngest person ever to have received that award at the Business School. Over the past 40 years, his articles in The Harvard Business Review have been some of the most popular reprints for the publication. His HBR article "Accelerate!" won the 2012 McKinsey Award for the world's most practical and groundbreaking thinking in the business/management arena.
Kotter has authored 20 books to date - twelve of them bestsellers. His books have reached millions and have been printed in over 150 foreign language editions. Arguably his most popular book, Our Iceberg Is Melting, was released in 2006. This New York Times bestseller helped launch to a large audience the 8-step process for leading change. In 2014, Kotter published his book Accelerate, an evolution of his previous research on leading change. Accelerate highlights the iterative nature of the 8-step process, the importance of aligning people around a Big Opportunity, and how to create an organization that is both efficient and reliable, and fast and agile enough to respond to today’s challenges. Dr. Kotter is the Founder, Chairman and Head of Research at Kotter International, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations apply the concepts in his books in a practical and accessible way – helping them achieve unimaginable results, faster than they believe possible. Other widely read books include A Sense of Urgency, The Heart of Change and Leading Change, which Time magazine selected in 2011 as one of the 25 most influential business management books ever written.
Kotter's 21st book, Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results Despite Uncertain and Volatile Times brings together more than 40 years of research and more than a decade of Kotter International’s practical application of this research with organizations around the globe. Change sheds new light on how to build organizations – from businesses to governments – that are able to change and adapt rapidly.
Kotter’s research and pursuits in education, business and writing have earned the respect of his peers, helped transform organizations around the world, touched countless lives, and still inspires others to adopt his methods and spread the word. He continues to work tirelessly to achieve the goal of “millions leading, billions benefiting.”
Professor Kotter is a proud father of two and resides in Sarasota, FL with his wife, Nancy Dearman.
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Books By John P. Kotter
His accomplishments as a leader, author, educator, philanthropist, and management innovator are astonishing, and outshine even Soichiro Honda, J.C. Penney, Sam Walton, and Henry Ford. In this immensely readable book, Kotter relates how Matsushita created a large business, invented management practices that are increasingly being used today, helped lead his country's economic miracle after World War II wrote dozens of books in his latter years, founded a graduate school of leadership, created Japan's version of a Nobel Prize, and gave away hundreds of millions to good causes.
The Matsushita story expands our notion of the possible, even for a sickly youngster who did not have the benefit of a privileged background, education, good looks, or a charismatic presence. It tells us much about leadership, entrepreneurship, a drive for lifelong learning, and their roots. It demonstrates the power of a longterm outlook, idealistic goals, and humility in the face of great success.
Matsushita Leadership is both a biography and a set of lessons for careers and corporations in the 21st century. An inspirational story and a business primer, the implications are powerful, for organizations and for living a meaningful life.
The revised and updated tenth anniversary edition of the classic, beloved business fable that has changed millions of lives in organizations around the world.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple story about doing well under the stress and uncertainty of rapid change. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard Business School’s John Kotter, it can help you and your colleagues thrive during tough times.
On an iceberg near the coast of Antarctica, group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home—and almost no one listens to him.
The characters in the story—Fred, Alice, Louis, Buddy, the Professor, and NoNo—are like people you probably recognize in your own organization, including yourself. Their tale is one of resistance to change and heroic action, seemingly intractable obstacles and clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles. The penguins offer an inspiring model as we all struggle to adapt to new circumstances.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is based on John Kotter's pioneering research into the eight steps that can produce needed change in any sort of group. After finishing the story, you'll have a powerful framework for influencing your own team, no matter how big or small.
This tenth anniversary edition preserves the text of the timeless story, together with new illustrations, a revised afterword, and a Q&A with the authors about the responses they've gotten over the past decade. Prepare to be both enlightened and delighted, whether you're already a fan of this classic fable or are discovering it for the first time.
Transform your organization with speed and efficiency using this insightful new resource
Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient in helping organizations navigate the complexity, uncertainty and volatility of today's world. In Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times, authors John P. Kotter, Vanessa Akhtar, and Gaurav Gupta explore how to create non-linear, dramatic change in your organization. You'll discover the emerging science of change that teaches us about how to build organizations – from businesses to governments – that change and adapt rapidly.
In Change you'll discover:
- Why the ability of organizations to deal with threats and take advantage of opportunities in the face of ever greater complexity and uncertainty is being severely challenged
- In-depth, evidence-based, actionable solutions for dealing with institutional resistance to change
- Case studies and success stories that describe organizations who have successfully built the ability to change quickly into their DNA
- A universal approach for how to dramatically improve outcomes from various change efforts, including: strategy execution, digital transformation, restructuring, and more
Perfect for managers, executives, and leaders at companies of all types and sizes, Change will also prove to be a valuable asset to other professionals who serve these organizations. This book is for anyone seeking a proven approach for delivering fast, sustainable and comprehensive results.
Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter’s ideas on change management and leadership.
From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented M&A activity to scandal, greed, and ultimately, recessionwe’ve learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. It’s the rule. Now with a new preface, this refreshed edition of the global bestseller Leading Change is more relevant than ever.
John Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work. Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration published in Harvard Business Review.
Needed more today than at any time in the past, this bestselling business book serves as both visionary guide and practical toolkit on how to approach the difficult yet crucial work of leading change in any type of organization. Reading this highly personal book is like spending a day with the world’s foremost expert on business leadership. You’re sure to walk away inspiredand armed with the tools you need to inspire others.
Published by Harvard Business Review Press.
With penetrating insight, Kotter and Heskett trace the roots of both healthy and unhealthy cultures, demonstrating how easily the latter emerge, especially in firms which have experienced much past success. Challenging the widely held belief that "strong" corporate cultures create excellent business performance, Kotter and Heskett show that while many shared values and institutionalized practices can promote good performances in some instances, those cultures can also be characterized by arrogance, inward focus, and bureaucracy -- features that undermine an organization's ability to adapt to change. They also show that even "contextually or strategically appropriate" cultures -- ones that fit a firm's strategy and business context -- will not promote excellent performance over long periods of time unless they facilitate the adoption of strategies and practices that continuously respond to changing markets and new competitive environments.
Fundamental to the process of reversing unhealthy cultures and making them more adaptive, the authors assert, is effective leadership. At the heart of this groundbreaking book, Kotter and Heskett describe how executives in ten corporations established new visions, aligned and motivated their managers to provide leadership to serve their customers, employees, and stockholders, and thus created more externally focused and responsive cultures.
It doesn't have to be this way, maintain John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to win the support your idea needs to deliver valuable results. The key? Understand the generic attack strategies that naysayers and obfuscators deploy time and time again. Then engage these adversaries with tactics tailored to each strategy. By "inviting in the lions" to critique your idea--and being prepared for them--you'll capture busy people's attention, help them grasp your proposal's value, and secure their commitment to implementing the solution.
The book presents a fresh and amusing fictional narrative showing attack strategies in action. It then provides several specific counterstrategies for each basic category the authors have defined--including:
· Death-by-delay: Your enemies push discussion of your idea so far into the future it's forgotten.
· Confusion: They present so much data that confidence in your proposal dies.
· Fearmongering: Critics catalyze irrational anxieties about your idea.
· Character assassination: They slam your reputation and credibility.
Smart, practical, and filled with useful advice, Buy-In equips you to anticipate and combat attacks--so your good idea makes it through to make a positive change.
What’s the worst thing you can hear when you have a good idea at work?
“That’s not how we do it here!”
In their iconic bestseller Our Iceberg Is Melting, John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber used a simple fable about penguins to explain the process of leading people through major changes. Now, ten years later, they’re back with another must-read story that will help any team or organization cope with their biggest challenges and turn them into exciting opportunities.
Once upon a time a clan of meerkats lived in the Kalahari, a region in southern Africa. After years of steady growth, a drought has sharply reduced the clan’s resources, and deadly vulture attacks have increased. As things keep getting worse, the harmony of the clan is shattered. The executive team quarrels about possible solutions, and suggestions from frontline workers face a soul-crushing response: “That’s not how we do it here!”
So Nadia, a bright and adventurous meerkat, hits the road in search of new ideas to help her troubled clan. She discovers a much smaller group that operates very differently, with much more teamwork and agility. These meerkats have developed innovative solutions to find food and evade the vultures. But not everything in this small clan is as perfect as it seems at first.
Can Nadia figure out how to combine the best of both worlds—a large, disciplined, well-managed clan and a small, informal, inspiring clan—before it’s too late?
This book distills Kotter’s decades of experience and award-winning research to reveal why organizations rise and fall, and how they can rise again in the face of adversity.
Now, in A Sense of Urgency, Kotter shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change.
Why focus on urgency? Without it, any change effort is doomed. Kotter reveals the insidious nature of complacency in all its forms and guises.
In this exciting new book, Kotter explains:
· How to go beyond "the business case" for change to overcome the fear and anger that can suppress urgency
· Ways to ensure that your actions and behaviors -- not just your words -- communicate the need for change
· How to keep fanning the flames of urgency even after your transformation effort has scored some early successes
Written in Kotter's signature no-nonsense style, this concise and authoritative guide helps you set the stage for leading a successful transformation in your company.
Leading Change—now considered the change bible for leaders and managers worldwide—reveals why change is so difficult and lays out an actionable, eight-step process for implementing successful transformations. Cited by business leaders and influential organizations worldwide as the book to read when starting any type of change initiative, Accelerate (XLR8) vividly illustrates the five core principles underlying a new dual operating system, the eight accelerators that drive it, and how leaders must create a sense of urgency through role modeling. Perhaps most crucial, the book reveals how the best companies focus and align their people’s energy around what Kotter calls the big opportunity.
If you’re a pioneer, a leader who knows that bold change is necessary to survive and thrive in an ever-changing world, these two books will set you on a path to accelerate into a better, more profitable future.
Regarded by many as the authority on leadership and change, John P. Kotter is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning business and management thought leader, business entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and Harvard Business School professor. His ideas, books, speeches, and the company he founded in 2008, Kotter International, have helped mobilize people around the world to better lead organizations, and their own lives, in an era of increasingly rapid change. Kotter has authored nineteen books to date—twelve of them bestsellers. His books have reached millions and have been printed in over 150 foreign language editions.
It’s a familiar scene in organizations today: a new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and appoint your best people to make change happen. And it does—but not fast enough. Or effectively enough. Real value gets lost and, ultimately, things drift back to the default status.
Why is this scenario so frequently repeated in industries and organizations across the world? In the groundbreaking new book Accelerate (XLR8), leadership and change management expert, and best-selling author, John Kotter provides a fascinating answer—and a powerful new framework for competing and winning in a world of constant turbulence and disruption.
Kotter explains how traditional organizational hierarchies evolved to meet the daily demands of running an enterprise. For most companies, the hierarchy is the singular operating system at the heart of the firm. But the reality is, this system simply is not built for an environment where change has become the norm. Kotter advocates a new system—a second, more agile, network-like structure that operates in concert with the hierarchy to create what he calls a “dual operating system”—one that allows companies to capitalize on rapid-fire strategic challenges and still make their numbers.
Accelerate (XLR8) vividly illustrates the five core principles underlying the new network system, the eight Accelerators that drive it, and how leaders must create urgency in others through role modeling. And perhaps most crucial, the book reveals how the best companies focus and align their people’s energy and urgency around what Kotter calls the big opportunity.
If you’re a pioneer, a leader who knows that bold change is necessary to survive and thrive in an ever-changing world, this book will help you accelerate into a better, more profitable future.
Why is change so hard? Because in order to make any transformation successful, you must change more than just the structure and operations of an organization—you need to change people’s behavior. And that is never easy.
The Heart of Change is your guide to helping people think and feel differently in order to meet your shared goals. According to bestselling author and renowned leadership expert John Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen, this focus on connecting with people’s emotions is what will spark the behavior change and actions that lead to success. Now freshly designed, The Heart of Change is the engaging and essential complement to Kotter’s worldwide bestseller Leading Change.
Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale change can work. With real-life stories of people in organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and activated to overcome obstacles to change—and produce spectacular results. Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to get buy-in from their teams instead of creatively showing or doing something that appeals to their emotions and inspires them to spring into action. They call this the see-feel-change dynamic, and it is crucial for the success of any true organizational transformation.
Refreshingly clear and eminently practical, The Heart of Change is required reading for anyone facing the challenges inherent in leading change.
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