Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

An article by John Kotter
Harvard Business Review - 1995

Most major change initiatives—whether intended to boost quality, improve culture, or reverse a corporate death spiral—generate only lukewarm results. Many fail miserably. Why? Because managers don’t realize transformation is a process, not an event. Leaders who successfully transform businesses do eight things right and they do them in the right order.

1. Establish a sense of urgency: Examine competitive realities for potential crises and untapped opportunities and convince at least 75% of your managers that the status quo is more dangerous than the unknown.

2. Form a powerful guiding coalition: Assemble a group with shared commitment and enough power to lead the change effort and encourage them to work as a team outside the normal hierarchy.

3. Create a vision: Create a vision to direct the change effort and develop strategies for realizing that vision.

4. Communicate the vision: Communicate the new vision and strategies for achieving it. Teach new behaviors by the example of the guiding coalition.

5. Empower others to act on the vision: Alter systems undermining the vision and encourage risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.

6. Plan for and create short-term wins:  Define visible performance improvements and reward employees contributing to those improvements.

7. Consolidate improvements and produce more change: Use increased credibility from early wins to reinvigorate the change process with new projects and change agents.

8.Institutionalize new approaches: Articulate connections between new behaviors and corporate success.