Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Offers real-life sucess and failure stories and introduces the "see-feel-change" dynamic for changing feelings, rather than just the thought process.
Kotter (emeritus, leadership, Harvard Business School) and Cohen (CEO of Stuart Advisory Services Group) build upon Kotter's earlier book Leading Change, which examined 100 cases about how business leaders responded to large-scale change such as the adoption of new technologies, major strategic shifts, process reengineering, mergers and acquisitions, business unit restructuring, innovation processes, and cultural change, by analyzing a further 34 cases in an effort to demonstrate that change, at its heart, is about changing the behavior of people, which happens primarily by "speaking to people's feelings." They analyze the cases in the process of describing an eight-step process for addressing people's feelings. The steps of this process are summarized as "increase urgency," "build the guiding team," "get the vision right," "communicate for buy-in," "empower action," "create short-term wins," "don't let up," and "make change stick." Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Moving beyond the process of changeWhy is change so hard? Because in order to make any transformation successful, you must change more than just the structure and operations of an organization?you need to change people’s behavior. And that is never easy.The Heart of Change is your guide to helping people think and feel differently in order to meet your shared goals. According to bestselling author and renowned leadership expert John Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen, this focus on connecting with people’s emotions is what will spark the behavior change and actions that lead to success. Now freshly designed, The Heart of Change is the engaging and essential complement to Kotter’s worldwide bestseller Leading Change.Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale change can work. With real-life stories of people in organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and activated to overcome obstacles to change?and produce spectacular results. Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to get buy-in from their teams instead of creatively showing or doing something that appeals to their emotions and inspires them to spring into action. They call this the see-feel-change dynamic, and it is crucial for the success of any true organizational transformation.Refreshingly clear and eminently practical, The Heart of Change is required reading for anyone facing the challenges inherent in leading change.