The Heart of Change

by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen © 2002
Harvard Business School Press
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“Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All of these elements, and others, are important. But the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings.”

John Kotter’s new book represents the fruit of two years of research. The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change their Organizations puts more flesh on the meaty bones of Kotter’s classic text, Leading Change, which offered an eight-step approach to look at “what people actually did to transform their organizations to make them winners in a turbulent world.” The focus here is behavior change. “People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.” In other words, See-Feel-Change beats Analysis-Think-Change. “Successful organizations know how to overcome antibodies that reject anything new.” Change must take place in big leaps, the authors urge; incremental change is no longer enough. Successful large-scale change requires:

1. pushing the urgency up.
2. putting together a guiding team.
3. creating the vision and strategies.
4. effectively communicating vision and strategies.
5. removing barriers to action.
6. accomplishing short-term wins.
7. pushing for wave after wave of change until the work is done.
8. creating a new culture to make the behavior stick.

These arguments are driven home by the stories culled from over 200 interviews representing over 90 organizations worldwide. For the most part, real names are attached to these cases. Substitute stories from your own organization to contextually bring these points home. Some titles provide enough of a clue, such as “The Videotape of the Angry Customer.” Some tantalize, such as the powerful and poignant “General Mollo and I were Floating in the Water.” We excerpt here our personal favorite, “Gloves on the Boardroom Table,” submitted by Jon Stegner:

We had a problem with our whole purchasing process...I thought we had the opportunity to drive down purchasing costs not by 2% but by something in the order of $2 billion over the next five years. [But] nothing was happening.

To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, I asked one of our summer interns to do a small study of how much we pay for the different kinds of gloves used in our factories... I chose one item to keep it simple... she reported that our factories were using 424 different kinds of gloves! Every factory had their own supplier and their own negotiated price. The same glove could cost $5 at one factory and $17 at another...The student was able to collect a sample of every one...She tagged each one with the price on it and the factory it was used in. Then she sorted by division and type of glove.

We gathered them all up and put them in our boardroom one day. Then we invited all of the division presidents to come visit the room...It’s a rare event when these people don’t have anything to say. But that day, they just stood with their mouths gaping.

The gloves became part of a traveling road show. ...The road show reinforced at every level of the organization a sense of “this is how bad it is.” ...Competitive benchmarking was added to the road show. As a result, we were given a mandate for change. People would say, “We must act now,” which of course we did, and saved a great deal of money that could be used in much more sensible ways.

Even today, people still talk about the glove story.

Does your organization:

• Sufficiently communicate about vision and strategies? (“Smart people...undercommunicate all the time.”) Remember the power of symbol, story, and repetition.

• Eliminate restraints so that people and processes can work more effectively? (“You can’t hand out power in a bag” the authors remind us.)

• Change its culture for success? Culture change “develops through consistency of successful action over a sufficient period of time.” Promotion, orientation and celebration are key.

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