Book Review: Leading Change by John Kotter

John Kotter observes that within the global economy, macro-economic forces are in motion and are growing stronger with time resulting in deeper expectations to reduce costs, improve the quality of products and services, locate new opportunities for growth and increase productivity.

His contention is that transformation -- or change -- organizations need to keep up with these new demands have fallen short. The transformation sought by organizations has been disappointing and the painful result is wasted resources, and disillusioned employees. Methods that traditional management have tried fail to transform their organizations because, he reports, they fail to alter behavior.

Armed with over two decades of research, Kotter has observed two important patterns of organizations, which have achieved deep change. He found that useful change tends to occur when a step-by-step process is employed that creates power and motivation sufficient to overwhelm all the memory of tradition and inertia. He also observed that this process is never employed effectively unless it is driven by high-quality leadership -- not just excellent management – which is an important distinction he makes.

His multi-step process is establishing a sense of urgency; creating a guiding coalition; developing a vision and strategy; communicating the change vision; empowering broad-based action; generating short-term wins; consolidating gains and producing more change and anchoring new approaches in the culture.

I read this book soon after it was first published in 1996. I just read it again for a class I'm taking. It gave me good overall understanding of organizational change, which was helpful for me as someone who previously worked in a large engineering firm and who now pastors in a church.

But from experience, I would not recommend it to be applied to the church. I would recommend pastors to read it, but not to come to a board meeting with an 8-step process of how to change the church. Too much dependance on naturalism which I find tends to step on the soul. Anyone have a good experience using his model with the church? I'd like to hear about it.