John P. Kotter Quotes

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

Most people don't like change. They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.

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

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.

Management works in the system; leadership works on the system.

We know that leadership is very much related to change. As the pace of change accelerates, there is naturally a greater need for effective leadership.

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

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.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

To me, success in the job is setting a vision, guiding an organization through change - which is exactly what I did at Digitas, and I'm very proud of that - and bringing people together and with you. That, to me, is what it takes to be successful.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

Change is a process which has to be managed.

We've navigated a lot of change at Campbell's. The best thing for me to be able to do is to discuss that change with people.

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

That is the key challenge facing management today; change is the only constant.

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.

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

People have accused me of only working with good companies. No I don't. I work with some very dysfunctional companies or unbelievably dysfunctional organizations. The people that bring me in know what they're doing won't work for the future. They know they want to change and they want to change for the right reasons. They believe what I believe and that's why they called me.

The transformation will come from leadership.

Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.

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

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

Leadership produces change. That is its primary function

As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation.