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1 B EST OF HBR Leading Change Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:The Idea in Brief the core ideaThe Idea in Practice putting the idea to work 1 Article Summary 2 Leading Change : Why Transformation Efforts FailA list of related materials, with annotations to guide furtherexploration of the article s ideas and applications 10 Further Reading Leaders who successfully transform businesses do eight things right (and they do them in the right order). Reprint R0701J B EST OF HBR Leading Change Why Transformation Efforts Fail page 1 The Idea in BriefThe Idea in Practice COPYRIGHT 2006 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Most major Change initiatives whether in-tended to boost quality, improve culture, or reverse a corporate death spiral generate only lukewarm results. Many fail Kotter maintains that too many managers don t realize transformation is a process, not an event.

2 It advances through stages that build on each other. And it takes years. Pressured to accelerate the process, managers skip stages. But short-cuts never troubling, even highly capable managers make critical mistakes such as declaring victory too soon. Result? Loss of momentum, reversal of hard-won gains, and devastation of the entire transforma-tion understanding the stages of Change and the pitfalls unique to each stage you boost your chances of a successful transfor-mation. The payoff? Your organization flexes with tectonic shifts in competitors, markets, and technologies leaving rivals far give your transformation effort the best chance of succeeding, take the right actions at each stage and avoid common NeededPitfallsEstablish asense ofurgency Examine market and competitive reali-ties for potential crises and untappedopportunities. Convince at least 75% of your man-agers that the status quo is more dan-gerous than the unknown.

3 Underestimating the difficulty of drivingpeople from their comfort zones Becoming paralyzed by risksForm a pow-erful guidingcoalition Assemble a group with shared commit-ment and enough power to lead thechange effort. Encourage them to work as a teamoutside the normal hierarchy. No prior experience in teamwork at thetop Relegating team leadership to an HR,quality, or strategic-planning executiverather than a senior line managerCreate avision Create a vision to direct the Change effort. Develop strategies for realizing that vision. Presenting a vision that s too complicat-ed or vague to be communicated in fiveminutesCommunicatethe vision Use every vehicle possible to commu-nicate the new vision and strategies forachieving it. Teach new behaviors by the example ofthe guiding coalition. Undercommunicating the vision Behaving in ways antithetical to thevisionEmpowerothers to acton the vision Remove or alter systems or structuresundermining the vision.

4 Encourage risk taking and nontradition-al ideas, activities, and actions. Failing to remove powerful individualswho resist the Change effortPlan for andcreate short-term wins Define and engineer visible perform-ance improvements. Recognize and reward employees con-tributing to those improvements. Leaving short-term successes up tochance Failing to score successes early enough(12-24 months into the Change effort)Consolidateimprove-ments andproducemore Change Use increased credibility from earlywins to Change systems, structures, andpolicies undermining the vision. Hire, promote, and develop employeeswho can implement the vision. Reinvigorate the Change process withnew projects and Change agents. Declaring victory too soon with thefirst performance improvement Allowing resistors to convince troops that the war has been wonInstitutionalizenewapproaches Articulate connections between newbehaviors and corporate success. Create leadership development andsuccession plans consistent with thenew approach.

5 Not creating new social norms andshared values consistent with changes Promoting people into leadership posi-tions who don t personify the newapproach B EST OF HBR Leading Change Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter harvard business review january 2007page 2 COPYRIGHT 2006 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Leaders who successfully transform businesses do eight things right (and they do them in the right order). Editor s Note: Guiding Change may be the ulti-mate test of a leader no business survives over the long term if it can t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental Change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the busi-ness. Thus, Leading Change is both absolutely es-sential and incredibly nobody understands the anatomy of organizational Change better than retired Harvard Business School professor John P.

6 Kotter. This article, originally published in the spring of 1995, previewed Kotter s 1996 book Leading Change . It outlines eight critical suc-cess factors from establishing a sense of ex-traordinary urgency, to creating short-term wins, to changing the culture ( the way we do things around here ). It will feel familiar when you read it, in part because Kotter s vocabulary has entered the lexicon and in part because it contains the kind of home truths that we recog-nize, immediately, as if we d always known them. A decade later, his work on Leading Change remains definitive. Over the past decade, I have watched morethan 100 companies try to remake themselvesinto significantly better competitors. Theyhave included large organizations (Ford) andsmall ones (Landmark Communications),companies based in the United States (Gen-eral Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways),corporations that were on their knees (EasternAirlines), and companies that were earninggood money (Bristol-Myers Squibb).

7 These ef-forts have gone under many banners: totalquality management, reengineering, rightsiz-ing, restructuring, cultural Change , and turn-around. But, in almost every case, the basicgoal has been the same: to make fundamentalchanges in how business is conducted in orderto help cope with a new, more challengingmarket few of these corporate Change efforts havebeen very successful. A few have been utterfailures. Most fall somewhere in between, witha distinct tilt toward the lower end of the lessons that can be drawn are interestingand will probably be relevant to even more or- Leading Change B EST OF HBR harvard business review january 2007page 3 ganizations in the increasingly competitivebusiness environment of the coming most general lesson to be learned fromthe more successful cases is that the changeprocess goes through a series of phases that, intotal, usually require a considerable length oftime.

8 Skipping steps creates only the illusion ofspeed and never produces a satisfying result. Asecond very general lesson is that critical mis-takes in any of the phases can have a devastat-ing impact, slowing momentum and negatinghard-won gains. Perhaps because we have rela-tively little experience in renewing organiza-tions, even very capable people often make atleast one big error. Error 1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency Most successful Change efforts begin whensome individuals or some groups start to lookhard at a company s competitive situation,market position, technological trends, and fi-nancial performance. They focus on the po-tential revenue drop when an importantpatent expires, the five-year trend in decliningmargins in a core business, or an emergingmarket that everyone seems to be then find ways to communicate this in-formation broadly and dramatically, especiallywith respect to crises, potential crises, or greatopportunities that are very timely.

9 This firststep is essential because just getting a transfor-mation program started requires the aggres-sive cooperation of many individuals. Withoutmotivation, people won t help, and the effortgoes with other steps in the changeprocess, phase one can sound easy. It is over 50% of the companies I havewatched fail in this first phase. What are thereasons for that failure? Sometimes executivesunderestimate how hard it can be to drive peo-ple out of their comfort zones. Sometimes theygrossly overestimate how successful they havealready been in increasing urgency. Sometimesthey lack patience: Enough with the prelimi-naries; let s get on with it. In many cases, exec-utives become paralyzed by the downside pos-sibilities. They worry that employees withseniority will become defensive, that moralewill drop, that events will spin out of control,that short-term business results will be jeopar-dized, that the stock will sink, and that theywill be blamed for creating a paralyzed senior management often comesfrom having too many managers and notenough leaders.

10 Management s mandate is tominimize risk and to keep the current systemoperating. Change , by definition, requires cre-ating a new system, which in turn always de-mands leadership. Phase one in a renewalprocess typically goes nowhere until enoughreal leaders are promoted or hired into senior-level often begin, and beginwell, when an organization has a new headwho is a good leader and who sees the need fora major Change . If the renewal target is the en-tire company, the CEO is key. If Change isneeded in a division, the division general man-ager is key. When these individuals are not newleaders, great leaders, or Change champions,phase one can be a huge business results are both a blessing anda curse in the first phase. On the positive side,losing money does catch people s it also gives less maneuvering room. Withgood business results, the opposite is true: Con-vincing people of the need for Change is muchharder, but you have more resources to helpmake whether the starting point is good per-formance or bad, in the more successful cases Ihave witnessed, an individual or a group al-ways facilitates a frank discussion of poten-tially unpleasant facts about new competition,shrinking margins, decreasing market share,flat earnings, a lack of revenue growth, orother relevant indices of a declining competi-tive position.