John P. Kotter Quotes

The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.

Leadership is about setting a direction. It's about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to jump into a better future.

Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.

One of the most common ways to overcome resistance to change is to educate people about it beforehand. Communication of ideas helps people see the need for and the logic of a change. The education process can involve one-on-one discussions, presentations to groups, or memos and reports.

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

Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision.

Producing major change in an organization is not just about signing up one charismatic leader. You need a group - a team - to be able to drive the change. One person, even a terrific charismatic leader, is never strong enough to make all this happen.

Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms do but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a feeling of control over one's life, and the ability to live up to one's ideals. Such feelings touch us deeply and elicit a powerful response.

Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of others are never captured.

Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.

The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.

Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there.

Never underestimate the magnitude of the power of the forces that reinforce the status quo.

The heart of change is in the emotions.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

Leadership produces change. That is its primary function

We see, we feel, we change.

A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.

Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings.

Never underestimate the power of a good story.

A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time.

In a change effort, culture comes last, not first.

Overcoming complacency is crucial at the start of any change process, and it often requires a little bit of surprise, something that grabs attention at more than an intellectual level. You need to surprise people with something that disturbs their view that everything is perfect.

In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here.

We know that leadership is very much related to change. As the pace of change accelerates, there is naturally a greater need for effective leadership.