Organisational change is one of the biggest challenges facing managers today. In today’s turbulent business environment organisations must change just to maintain their past levels of success. Unfortunately anyone that has ever been charged with implementing change in an organisation, be it a large multinational, a government organisation, a charity or a small family business knows from bitter experience that whist it’s easy to talk about change, successfully implementing it is far from easy. In fact Kotter notes in the book that more than 70% of change initiatives fail.

In A Sense Of Urgency Kotter explains that in his experience the biggest problem organisations have is creating a sense of urgency, and that he believes is the first step in a series of actions needed to succeed in a changing world. The book goes on to outline four tactics that you can use to create urgency in your organisation (no matter who you are). These tactics are:

• Bring the outside in – bring in different views from outside your organisation.
• Behave with urgency every day – as has has been said before, be the change.
• find opportunities in crises
• deal with NoNos – deal with those who will object and actively or passively seek to derail the change.

John Kotter is the Konosuke Matsuhita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is widely regarded as the one of the world’s foremost authorities on leadership and change. He has also written a number of other books, most notably Leading Change, The Heart of Change and Our Iceberg Is Melting.

If you’re charged with implementing change in an organisation and you don’t want to be port of the 70% that fails then you should buy and read this book – NOW – behave with urgency! If you’re a manager, even if you don’t believe you’re responsible for you should still find time to read what Kotter has to say about complacency and how to overcome it.

You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

Subscribe:
If you enjoyed this post and would like to be kept updated on future posts, then please Subscribe by Email or subscribe to my RSS Feed.