![]() ![]() If you can’t communicate the vision in five minutes or less and get a reaction that indicates both understanding and interest, your work in this stage isn’t done.Ĥ. Without a coherent and sensible vision, a change effort dissolves into a list of confusing and incompatible projects. In successful transformation efforts, the chairman or president or general manager of the division, plus another five to 50 others-including many, but not all, of the most influential people in the unit- develop a shared commitment to renewal.ģ. Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition. When is the urgency rate high enough? When 75% of management is genuinely convinced that the status quo is, in the words of the CEO of a European company, “more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”Ģ. Half of all change efforts fail at the start. Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency. Consolidating improvements and producing still more changeįor each of the stages in a change process, there is a corresponding pitfall.ġ. Planning for and creating short-term winsħ. And since the success of a given stage depends on the work done in prior stages, a critical mistake in any of the stages can have a devastating impact.ĥ. Skipping steps to try to accelerate the process invariably causes problems. These stages should be worked through in sequence. Moreover, a successful change process goes through a series of eight distinct stages. Why do so many transformation efforts produce only middling results? One overarching reason is that leaders typically fail to acknowledge that large-scale change can take years. Kotter’s lessons are instructive, for even the most capable managers often make at least one big error. A second lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing improvement and negating previous gains. Skipping steps creates only an illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. One lesson is that change involves numerous phases that, together, usually take a long time. The lessons that can be learned will be relevant to more and more organizations as the business environment becomes increasingly competitive in the coming decade. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale. In almost every case, the goal has been the same: to cope with a new, more challenging market by changing how business is conducted.Ī few of those efforts have been very successful. Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. In the past decade, the author has watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into better competitors.
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