NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY | Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail | by John Kotter | | Calvin Beecher | 11/17/2013 |

John P. Kotter’s frequently cited article, “Leading Change,” Kotter argues that many companies, when attempting to reorganize themselves and make fundamental changes to their business, make eight errors: not establishing a great enough sense of urgency, not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition, lacking a vision, under-communicating the vision by a factor of ten, not removing obstacles to the new vision, not systematically planning for and creating short-term wins, declaring victory too soon, and not anchoring changes in the corporation’s culture. In contrast, organizations that successfully transform themselves perform the following steps in the right order: establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating the vision, empowering others to act on the vision, planning for and creating short-term wins, consolidating improvements and producing still more change, and institutionalizing new approaches.
Accomplishment of Objectives
Kotter sets out to illustrate eight ways a company can fail to reengineer itself and eight steps a company can take to successfully transform to meet market needs. At this, he succeeds. More importantly, his arguments are reasonable and persuasive. Rather than simply give us yet another list of things to do to succeed, Kotter tells us how we will fail if we do not heed his advice. He claims:
A few of these corporate change efforts have been very successful. A few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale…Perhaps because we have relatively little experience in renewing organizations, even very capable people often make at least one big error.
In this way, Kotter grabs our