John P. Kotter Quotes

You must be on top of change or change will be on top of you.

Change before you're forced to change.

The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.

How you manage change can make all the difference.

Knowing how to deal with change effectively is a primary requirement for living successfully in perhaps the most exciting time in all of human history

Flexibility in a time of great change is a vital quality of leadership.

Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

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

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them.

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

Don't fear change - embrace it.

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

Just like any business is a living, breathing thing, an entrepreneur has to be able to adapt over time.

When you face unexpected events, you have to try to overcome those problems, but at the same time, you have to continue working according to the plan that you defined since the beginning. So that's what we have tried to do - not to avoid the urgent responses but to continue the route that we had defined.

In my life I have always found ways of dealing with a situation.

You must always be able to predict what's next and then have the flexibility to evolve.

When there are things that don't go according to plan, London will cope.

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.

If you're going to stick around in this business, you have to have the ability to reinvent yourself, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Things you don't expect come up, and you have to adapt. You can't let it throw you off. You have to cope. Those are all really valuable skills, in life and racing.

When you deal with change, you have a couple choices: you can lead it and make the rules, or you can be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.