The Eight Steps

The first four steps help to defrost a hardened status quo. They are:

· establishing a sense of urgency
· creating the guiding coalition
· developing a vision and strategy
· communicating the change vision

The next stages then introduce many new practices:

· empowering a broad base of people to take action
· generating short term wins
· consolidating gains and producing even more change

The final stage is required to ground the changes in the corporate culture, and make them stick:

· institutionalizing new approaches in the culture

Annotation
Geared toward managers and business students, this leadership guide identifies an eight-step process that companies must go through to achieve their goals. It also details change issues, the force behind successful change and future trends for organizations. To help illustrate principles, the author provides interesting stories and examples.

From the Publisher
What will it take to bring your organization successfully into the twenty-first century? The world's foremost expert on business leadership distills twenty-five years of experience and wisdom based on lessons he has learned from scores of organizations and businesses to write this visionary guide. The result is a very personal book that is at once inspiring, clear-headed, and filled with important implications for the future. The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet 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, says Kotter, because they fail to alter behavior. Emphasizing again and again the critical need for leadership to make change happen, Leading Change provides the vicarious experience and positive role models for leaders to emulate. The book identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people - good people - often derail.