Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Specifically,

¶ … Leading Change by John P. Kotter. Specifically, it will review, summarize, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the main points in the book. Kotter's book is an interesting look at change in organizations, and how to create viable changes that will allow organizations to grow and prosper with the times. In his book, Kotter outlines eight stages that lead to change and leadership in the organization. He breaks them up into more manageable steps that can be implemented one at a time.

He calls the first four steps "defrosting" and notes they help to defrost a hardened status quo. These steps are: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, and communicating the change vision. The next three stages help introduce new practices. They are: empowering a broad base of people to take action, generating short-term wins, and consolidating gains and producing even more change. Then, the final stage is a must to ground the changes in the corporate culture, and make them stick.

It is: institutionalizing new approaches in the culture (Kotter 33-145). An important strength of this method of changing management is that the steps are all laid out with examples and information on how to follow each one. There is no guesswork if they are followed. A weakness is that Kotter maintains the steps are all logical, and must be followed in order without skipping for them to work.

Since many managers face time constraints when they find they need change in the organization, they may be tempted to skip steps, especially in the "defrosting" change, and Kotter maintains if steps are skipped, the final result will not work. Kotter also maintains there are eight vital reasons businesses fail.

They are: Allowing too much complacency, failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition, underestimating the power of vision, undercommunicating the vision, permitting obstacles to block the vision, failing to create short-term wins, declaring victory too soon, and neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture (Kotter 16). The strengths of these arguments are difficult to dispute. Organizations regularly perform all or part of these eight practices in many facets of business, and fail to recognize the problems they create that can lead to business failure.

Recognizing these practices can help a business rebuild and become more successful and vital, and training managers to recognize these practices is a good idea for any business that wants to remain viable in today's highly volatile and competitive marketplace. However, as with all "self-help" books and ideas, everyone must "buy in" to these methods and ideas, or they will ultimately fail in the organization, and that is a major weakness within this, and other "change" oriented literature.

If one or two people resist these methods of change, they can bring down results over the entire organization, and so, management must not only learn how to change, they must learn how to encourage others and to produce results. Kotter acknowledges that change takes time, and that participants may become discouraged before seeing major or even minor results. He writes, "As the magnitude of the effort becomes clear, you will be tempted to give up. If you stay the course, the total time involved will be lengthy" (Kotter 140).

Thus, he is realistic.