Summary Of The Heart Of Change

Introduction

John Kotter and Dan Cohen’s book, The Heart of Change, is a book about how people are able to influence and change the behavior within their organization. They do this with the purpose of bettering and improving the organizational and operational environment to foster success. The use of real life stories takes the book from theory to practical application and demonstrates how with the right motivation anything is possible. Kotter and Cohen tell us that the behavior in any organization can be changed by following eight steps. The steps that must be followed: 1-Increased Urgency, 2-Build Guiding Team, 3-Get Vision Right, 4-Communicate for Buy-in, 5-Empower Action, 6-Create Short-Term Wins, 7-Don’t Let Up, and 8-Make Change

To ensure success for the long haul there must be attainable and achievable short term goals along the way. When a company needs to make major changes as in the “The List on the Bulletin Board”, we find a company that has 150 items that need to be changed. The temptation is to throw all 150 into the “air” at one time. Doing this would create a sense of panic as everyone scramble to the point of feeling overwhelmed and ultimately nothing getting accomplished. Instead the company decided to create the “Big Four”. The big four were based on priority of work and until these four were near completion number five would not be introduced. What this did was to keep the list attainable and allowed for small successes that ultimately lead to overall change. As we see by allowing early wins no matter how small, the employees within an organization begin to believe in the change. It is imperative that one stays away from too many projects at once, no early wins, and lying to make things sound more successful than they are as this will have an negative impact on the

After the small victories you don’t want to lose that momentum. There is the risk that complacency will set in due to these short term wins again because people get comfortable. It is critical to ensure that they understand that there is still a ways to go to get to the final change destination. As in “The Street” we see an organization that takes advantage of unique circumstances to begin the next phase of changes. “The change effort in “The Street” succeeds not because it directly creates collaboration ….It works because everyone sees the company building space…..”(Kotter and Cohen, pg 156). If not careful, management can create environments that get bogged down by redundancy and mechanisms that slow down the system. One must remove no longer relevant tasks, get creative to ensure step one is maintained, and lead by example. Make sure everything is completed, get rid of old systems and routines that don’t work, and do not drain