John Kotter Quotes

In successful transformations, the president, division general manager, or department head plus another five, fifteen, or fifty people with a commitment to improved performance pull together as a team.

Budgeting is a math exercise, number crunching. Planning is a logical, linear process. Strategizing requires a great deal of information about customers and competitors, along with conceptual skills. Visioning uses a very different part of the brain than budgeting. As the name implies, it involves trying to see possible futures. It inevitably has both a creative and emotional component (e.g., “How do we feel about the options?”). When you use “orthodox planning” to create a vision, frustration and failure are inevitable.

A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time.

Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision.

We see, we feel, we change.

Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly. The most important aspects of management include planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling, and problem solving. Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances. Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.

Analytical tools have their limitations in a turbulent world. These tools work best when parameters are known, assumptions are minimal, and the future is not fuzzy.

No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service.

Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word.

Valued achievements connect to people at a deeper level—and a deeper level can change behavior that is generally very difficult to change.

Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones. It takes you into territory that is new and less well known, or even completely unknown to you.

Without conviction that you can make change happen, you will not act, even if you see the vision. Your feelings will hold you back.

Leading Change describes the eight steps people follow to produce new ways of operating. In The Heart of Change, we dig into the core problem people face in all of these steps, and how to successfully deal with that problem. Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All those 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.

The heart of change is in the emotions.

Whenever smart and well-intentioned people avoid confronting obstacles, they disempower employees and undermine change.