Mary Schapiro’s job was to fix the SEC. She didn’t stop there.
1. Kotter’s eight steps
As already noted, the SEC was starkly exposed as ill-equipped to deal with the chaos erupting across the globe. It was under strong criticism for the serious fraud of Bernard Madoff and the collapse of Wall Street stalwart Lehman Brothers. Accordingly, Mary Schapiro, a career regulator, was appointed the 29th chairman of SEC to save a languishing SEC. She changed the way they were doing things at the SEC including creating new structures, procedures, and programs to better address the modern financial markets as an urgent need to restore the credibility and public confidence in the SEC. This analysis is based on Kotter’s (1995) eight-step process for leading successful change.
a. Establishing a sense of urgency
The chairwoman argues that urgency is critical. Schapiro developed a change program with three priorities comprising internal assessment, investor protection focus and mistakes acknowledgement. The mission was to turn the SEC to be a high functioning, agile and intelligent, and committed to investor protection and market integrity.

b. Creating a guiding coalition
In order to able to manage the change process, she brought in new leadership and new senior team. The new leadership team set about retraining, skilling up and motivating the SEC’s talent staff. In addition, the investor –focused agenda was putting in place. The board and senior management and then all levels of decision making were required to pay attention to risk at all level of an enterprise. The whistle blower program was set up to detect securities violations. A final goal was to admit the mistakes that the SEC made under its watch. This is the first step in communicating the change vision.

c. Developing a vision and strategy
A vision was created to help direct the change effort, that was, to build a high functioning, agile and intelligent, and committed to investor protection and market integrity agency.
d. Communicating the change vision
In order to communicate the change vision, the chairwoman developed an open way communication in which all staff and bankers could directly discuss with her.
e. Empowering broad-based actions
The SEC critically trained their staff to become certified fraud examiners. The organisation was restructured by removing the whole layer of management sending those to the frontline putting thousand staff to different focus groups such as corrupt foreign practices, insider trading, market manipulation and structured products.
In addition, the SEC also set rules for over the counter and asset backed securities, hedge funds and examination program.
f. Generate short- term wins
Monetary reward and safe avenue were offered to whistle blower as a way to encourage people to detect securities violation as part of the change program.
Fine was charged to financial institution (Goldman Sachs) due to misleading investor mortgage securities.

g. Consolidating gains and producing more change

h. Anchor new approaches in the future
The change within the SEC was continually anchored for several years after the change commenced.