Kofi Annan Quotes

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.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

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

The most effective way to manage change is to create it.

The transition strategies are more important than understanding what the outcome state will be.

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.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

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.

I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.

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.

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

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

Everybody wants change. But the problem is how you manage change.

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 you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

If it's one thing we do really well as a company, it's that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.

Change is a process which has to be managed.

It's important not to try to convince others of your own reasons for change. Finding the reason why they should want to support your efforts is the key to effective change management.

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

Usually, when you're taking over a team, you're restructuring, you're tearing it down, you're building it up again.

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

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.

Most organizations fail in driving change.