John
Kotter’s Required Reading
John
Kotter has been the go-to guy on the subject
of change leadership longer than most of us have been working. For the past 35
years or so, he has been making the compelling argument that the essential role
of leaders lies in their ability to achieve change — to shepherd their
organizations to new and better places. The fast-paced and fundamental
disruptions caused by advances in digital technologies make his work more
relevant than ever.
Kotter
codified his findings in an eight-step
change leadership process in the mid-1990s,
while at Harvard Business School. He taught there full time from 1972 (when he
earned his doctorate) to 2001, when he retired as the Konosuke Matsushita
Professor of Leadership. In 2008, he cofounded Kotter
International, a consultancy that helps sitting leaders at
large companies apply his ideas. Among many other honors, he is a recipient of
the Lifetime Achievement Award from American Society for Training and
Development.
A
prolific writer, Kotter has authored 19 books. Leading
Change (Harvard Business School Press,
1996), which Time selected as one
of the 25 most influential business management books ever written, The
Heart of Change(with Dan S. Cohen; Harvard Business
School Press, 2002), and A Sense of
Urgency (Harvard Business Press, 2008)
detail and explore his change leadership process. To spread the word still
further, Kotter teamed up with Holger Rathgeber and wrote a business parable
featuring penguins, Our
Iceberg Is Melting (St. Martin’s Press,
2005), which also landed on the New York Times’ bestseller
list.
Kotter’s
latest book, That’s
Not How We Do It Here! (Penguin, 2016), is
another parable written with Rathgeber. This time, the main characters are
African meerkats, whose struggle to cope with a drought illuminates the
obstacles organizations face in disruptive conditions.
I asked Kotter about the books that had most
influenced him in his work. He offered up the following titles, calling them
“the big three that helped lead me where I am today.”
Organizational
Psychology, by Edgar H. Schein (Prentice-Hall, 1965).
“I was
a senior at MIT and president of my fraternity when I discovered Edgar Schein’s
Organizational Psychology. Schein was describing how organizations work
— or don’t — and I found myself saying, ‘He’s got it!’ The book was useful to
me in trying to run an organization. How interesting! It woke me up to the idea
that running organizations could be a whole area of study, and my experience
applying Schein’s ideas made me want to do that. And, as my own company grows
and evolves, I often find myself going back to the fundamentals Schein was able
to distill.”
The
Interpretation of Dreams, by
Sigmund Freud (1900).
“I
read The Interpretation of Dreams when I was in graduate
school. It was mind-boggling for me — here’s a guy turning clinical
observations into interpretations, and then showing evidence that they are
fundamental to how humans behave. Freud’s notion that the brain is, for the
most part, outside of our conscious control — an idea that we too often find
convenient to ignore — was critical to how I researched and thought about how
people respond within organizations. Applying that concept to the topic of
leadership, I found that the best leaders intuitively sense that a whole lot of
stuff is going on in addition to the exchange of information based on data, and
it’s that other stuff that has always fascinated me.”
In
Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. (Harper
& Row, 1982).
“I was
an assistant professor when In Search of Excellence came out.
I thought the way Peters and Waterman had gone about this research was
interesting: Look for the extreme cases and try to see the patterns that relate
to performance over time. Just as important for my own direction were the
stories that Peters and Waterman told in the book. I realized that I could
frame what I learned in terms of data, and that’s important to appeal to the
head, but it’s our stories that appeal to the heart. So, when I have
information that I think is particularly important that lots of people
understand, I try to tell it in the form of a story. Which will you remember?”
Theodore Kinni
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