By interviewing 400 individuals from 130 distinct businesses to get their change sagas, authors John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen further develop the approach to organizational change presented in Kotter's Leading Change (1996). Their central insight is that organizations change when their people change. And people change for emotional reasons. The authors warn against trying to promote transformation in your organization by relying purely on spreadsheets or reports; they provide background information on why it is also important to address employees' emotions. They explain that the best way to engage the emotions is not to "tell" but to "show" - via videos, displays, or even office design. The visual sense, they point out, processes enormous amounts of complex information instantly.
At the end of each chapter, the authors include useful and simple "Exercises That Might Help." Kotter reintroduces his eight-step change model and demonstrates how it works, using stories of real-life managers and companies as concrete examples for each of the eight steps. Thus the form of the book - "showing" - exactly replicates its core lesson.
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