Andy Stanley Quotes

Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.

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

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

Change is a process which has to be managed. If it's managed and managed well in the interest of the nation and the people, the likelihood is that it will end well.

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.

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.

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

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

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

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.

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

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

Most organizations fail in driving change.

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

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

I'm impatient. Typically people think they know all about change and don't need help. Their approach tends to be more management-oriented than leadership-oriented. It's very frustrating.

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.

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.

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.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty. But the point is to move quickly - faster than you are comfortable - because in hindsight, you will always wish you had made changes even sooner.

When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.

Change is a process which has to be managed.