John P. Kotter Quotes

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

You don't implement change easily in Japan unless you explain very clearly why you need to do this change, how you're going to do this change and what's going to be the outcome of this change. If you offset or you forget to explain one of these three steps you're not going to do it.

Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

I am often asked about the difference between 'change management' and 'change leadership,' and whether it's just a matter of semantics. These terms are not interchangeable.

When it comes to communicating change at any time, the mission must be clear, and it must inspire.

I think there's a lot of things that need to be changed in the business.

Effective leaders help others to understand the necessity of change and to accept a common vision of the desired outcome.

Designing and implementing a strategy for change is a waste of time until you have discovered and embraced the current reality. If you don't know where you really are, it is impossible to get where you need to be.

Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.

In business, sometimes you have to change the CEO in order to change the direction of the company.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

So in one leap we had gone from being a friendly society to something almost professional.

What is clear is that business leaders must commit to champion change - to be transparent about their goals for change, to align their incentives systems to drive the change, and to make sure their work environments are flexible in a way that allows men and women who choose to work to be able to achieve all of their potential.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.