John Kotter
Interview
MBA in één dag®
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CV John Kotter •
John Paul Kotter is geboren in 1947.
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Hij studeerde aan de Massachusetts Institute of Technology en daarna aan Harvard en is sinds 1972 verbonden aan de Harvard Business School.
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In 1980, hij was toen 33 jaar oud, kreeg hij een volledig professoraat aan Harvard, waarmee hij een van de jongste mensen in de geschiedenis van een van de beste business schools ter wereld was, die een dergelijke eer ten beurt viel.
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Is auteur van 17 boeken, waaronder de internationale bestseller Leading Change (1996) en Our Iceberg is Melting (2006).
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Van zijn wetenschappelijke artikelen in de Harvard Business Review werden anderhalf miljoen reprints verkocht, meer dan welke andere auteur ook in de afgelopen twintig jaar.
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Kotter is de Konosuke Matsushita Emeritus Professor in leiderschap aan de Harvard Business school.
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John Kotter is getrouwd met Nancy Dearman.
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John Kotter
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John Kotter on How Change Is Changing
Interview
Meet the MasterMinds:
Harvard Business School Professor, John Kotter, is an expert on leadership and change. He’s the author of fifteen books, including Leading Change, The Heart of Change, Matsushita Leadership, Power and Influence, and his latest, Our Iceberg Is Melting. Rated the number one “leadership guru” in America by Business Week magazine, Kotter is the premier voice on how the best organizations actually “do” change. We ask Kotter about his new book and about how consultants can play a productive role in leading organization change.
McLaughlin: Based on your observations, how has organizational change changed? Kotter: The good news is that most organizations have gotten better at managing and guiding change. The bad news is that the world is changing faster than organizations are getting better at it, and the gap may be growing. The data overwhelming show that the rate of change is increasing, though not everywhere,
not at the same speed, and not linearly. Many organizations just can’t keep up with the speed of change. The notion that change comes in waves and will slow down may be true over a millennium or two. But within the timeframe most of us must deal with, that is, one to ten or fifteen years, the rate of change is just going up and up.
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McLaughlin: So to continue improving capability for change, where do you think organizations and leaders should focus their efforts? Kotter: Everywhere—they need to get better at all of the eight steps that I identified for successful change: they must create a sense of urgency; build guiding teams; get the vision right; communicate for buy-in; empower action; produce short-term wins; never let up; and make change stick. That formula has proven to be both a good way to conceptualize the process and a useful action plan. People make mistakes in all eight steps but, in particular, I think that more attention should be paid to the front end of the change process. McLaughlin: You mean on creating a sense of urgency?
Kotter: Yes. If there is one place to focus, for most organizations most of the time, it’s getting better at convincing people that they are facing a dire problem and must do something about it. People often say to me “Oh, no, no, lack of urgency is not an issue—our people understand how important it is to solve this problem. We’re beyond that.” So instead of working on the sense of urgency, they want to talk about the team or, more likely, they want to talk about communicating the vision for the future. They want to skip to step four. The trouble is, when I talk to people two levels down in the organization, I discover that the sense of urgency is about one-fifth of what it should be. Yes, some people recognize the immediacy of
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the problem. Not everybody—some people go deeply into denial. But when you ask the ones who do see the problem clearly to elaborate, they point to somebody else. Therefore, their personal sense of urgency is often zero. The people at the top may think there’s plenty sense of urgency, yet if you dig down into the organization, you discover it’s not nearly what it needs to be to sustain change through the whole process. People don’t want to hear that, by the way. Managers come to me all the time and describe their two-year change efforts. I listen and ask do you want to hear what I think? I then say your problem is back at the beginning. Who wants to hear that? Maybe they’ve been working on the project for a year or two. They think they’re way down the road and want to talk about
Interview
Without an organizationwide sense of urgency, it’s like trying to build a pyramid on a foundation of empty shoeboxes.
getting more short-term wins. Without an organization-wide sense of urgency, it’s like trying to build a pyramid on a foundation of empty shoeboxes. McLaughlin: What’s your sense of the most effective way to use outside help—consultants and other service providers—to facilitate change? Kotter: Number one, pick competent outside help, which is to say they’re good at whatever issue you’re facing. If you are working on change, find someone who really understands that. Second, listen to their advice. It’s also important to help clients understand how consultants can help them—as opposed to you helping them and then discovering that they are not competent to use the help. You can end up in this ridiculous situation where you throw a life buoy over the railing to a drowning client who picks it up and throws 7
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If people are fearful about change, though, and the only aspect you improve is communication, you will probably fail.
it back at you. In some cases, helping clients understand better how to use you is not easy. In extreme cases, it may be impossible. The point for a client is that just because you have an issue that you think outsiders can help you address doesn’t mean you know how to make that outside help work well for your organization. McLaughlin: During the change process, how can a leader maintain momentum in the face of disruptive organizational restructurings such as layoffs or redeployments? Kotter: The ultimate way to help people believe in what you are doing is not words, but deeds. Fear is an inherent part of change, even when you do it well. So fear will be a factor when you start to change an organization, although not necessarily for everybody or to the same degree. Now if you treat fear as a step four problem— communication of the vision—you’ll work harder to send your people the message that there is a better future and this is the right way to get there. If people are fearful about change, though, and the only aspect you improve is communication, you will probably fail. Again, it’s about deeds: Every time you do something well, fear goes down because credibility goes up.
For example, if you do step two well—you put together a great team of people who look like they know what they’re doing—the fear level will go down because people will think “Maybe there’s a chance that they can pull this off and I’m not going to be pushed off a cliff after all.” It’s the same for every step in the process. When people see it being done right, their fear level quite rationally goes down and their conviction grows that the plan can work. Skepticism on the intellectual side and fear on the emotional both go down. The probability that they will step forward to help and initiate in useful ways goes up. People do resist change because they’re afraid. But they also resist change if they perceive that it’s being done stupidly. If you can get them to understand how they can play a constructive part, sometimes it’s amazing what happens. McLaughlin: The fable format of your latest book, Our Iceberg Is Melting, is a departure from your past writing style. Why did you choose that format and how was it to write that way? Kotter: Well, the answer to the last part is the easiest—it was enormous fun. It’s the most fun thing I’ve done. Ten years ago, if you had asked me about fables
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as a genre for teaching about organizations, management, or life, I would have said that’s not a good approach. I would have said that maybe some people learn from them, but I don’t personally find them very helpful. I’m what you’d call an empiricist, which makes it all the more remarkable that I would end up writing a fable. About five years ago, I talked to a terrific leader who told me, in a very nice way, that he wished more of his people would read my book, Leading Change, but he knew they wouldn’t. He pointed out that a lot of people just don’t read business books and articles. And when they do, they want it in five or ten pages. He said that he had vice presidents who were intimidated, not just by footnotes or long words, but by a graph or chart, and they’ll never admit it. What I heard from him and other leaders was that change initiatives would be more effective if people at all levels of the organization really understood the process. But a standard business book is not always the right tool for that. A fable seemed like a great way to reach more people. Researchers and experts tell us that the brain is hardwired to accept stories because that’s how it developed over time. After all, before we had books and classrooms, people learned through verbal stories and pictures.
Also, stories have emotional glue on them. They flow into the brain without getting rejected, they stick easily, and anything that was connected to them sticks too. McLaughlin: If you were discussing a change initiative with somebody who was just getting started, what one piece of advice would you give that person? Kotter: Most of the time, if you want something to change, you want to get on with it quickly. There is a problem, the boss wants it fixed, and so you feel pressure and also just an instinct—let’s go. I’d say before you start racing down the track, make sure you know something about what running is all about, what running shoes are best, where there might be pitfalls on the track, and why some people win or lose races. I’m not saying you should sit around and study it for three years. Speed is important, increasingly so. But pause and learn about what does and doesn’t work and the typical problems people run into that you can avoid. If you get that knowledge upfront, it can save you great grief and money later on. McLaughlin: Thanks very much for your time.
Bron: www.managementconsultingnews.com
9 MBA in één dag | John Kotter
Interview with John P Kotter on Leadership Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary “Leadership tends to be involved more with
disrupting the status quo by helping people develop some vision of a new future, a vision that has a market-oriented logic to it, and a strategy for actually achieving that vision.” John P Kotter
John P Kotter is a graduate of MIT and Harvard. In 1980, at the age of 33, he was voted a full professorship with tenure at Harvard Business School. Today, he is widely regarded as the best speaker in the world on the topics of leadership and change. Professor Kotter is the author of 15 books, a collection that has given him more honors and awards than any other writer on the topics of leadership and change. His five most recent books include Our Iceberg is Melting, new in 2006. The Heart of Change, a 2002 best book list winner from both Amazon. com and Executive Book Summaries, John P Kotter on What Leaders Really Do, 1999’s collection of papers including McKinsey award winning pieces from the Harvard Business Review, Matsushita Leadership, 1998’s first place winner in the Financial Times, Booz-
Allen Global Business Book Competition for biography/autobiography, and Leading Change, named the #1 management book of the year in 1996 by Management General. His articles in the Harvard Business Review have sold more than two and a half million reprints. Professor Kotter’s books have been printed in over 90 foreign language editions with total sales approaching two million copies. Professor Kotter’s other honors include an Exxon Award for Innovation in Graduate Business School Curriculum Design, and a Johnson, Smith & Knisely Award for New Perspectives in Business Leadership. In 2004, a video he produced won the “Oscar” (a Telly award) for educational films. In October 2001, BusinessWeek magazine reported a survey they conducted of 504
10 MBA in één dag | John Kotter
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enterprises that rated Professor Kotter as #1 “Leadership guru” in America.
up, or as our aspirations go up in ways that demand change, leadership becomes increasingly important.
What is the difference between leaders and managers or leadership and management? First, management basically runs existing systems of people and technology. It does so with processes we associate with planning andbudgeting, organizing and staffing,controlling and problem solving. Leadership is very different. Leadership creates those systems that managers manage and it helps them to adapt to new opportunities that emerge and to avoid hazards that can hurt an
Should leadership be looked at as a science or an art? If it is a science, what are the universal principles of leadership? If it is to be believed as an art, what does it take to nurture and develop leadership? At this point it’s hard to either study or to teach leadership as a science. It is an art form—a complex set of behaviors that don’t easily reduce themselves to something that can be studied with scientific methods or taught in the same way as you can teach
organization. So, the heart of leadership is all associated with change, and not incremental changes but significant change. Second, leadership tends to be involved more with disrupting the status quo by helping people develop some vision of a new future, a vision that has a market-oriented logic to it,and a strategy for actually achieving that vision. It involves communicating that information to relevant people so that they actually believe it and want to make it a reality. Third, it involves motivating and inspiring, empowering and helping people actually make the vision a reality, despite the obstacles. In a stable world, management is much more important than leadership. As the rate of change goes
management. Now, having said that, you can help people in formal educational settings, and by mentoring, books, etc., to see the growing importance of leadership. You can help people understand what leadership is and how it is different from management. You can help people see the relationship of leadership to change, and how technology and globalization will only bring us more and more change. There are universal principles that can be taught: about vision and strategy, about communication for buy-in, about empowerment and inspiration. I have written much about this in four books, and I have another coming out soon. The new book is called Our Iceberg is Melting. You can 11
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also help people assess their own behavior against what leadership is, and you can help motivate them to want to find opportunities to develop whatever potential they have. Are leadership styles influenced by national cultures? If one defines styles as some of the more very specific ways in which people act—how they dress, structure some aspects of their days, have lunch—those areas are clearly influenced by national culture. If a leader simply ignores them, if you drop a Canadian into India, for example, and she acts exactly as she does in Canada, you can have difficulties. The Canadian style could get in the way of that person’s actually helping others to create the right vision, getting people to work together to create the right strategy, etc. So the answer to your question is ‘yes’, national culture is important. But there are those who believe that leadership is entirely dependent on the local culture and that is not true. From all the work I have done the evidence is overwhelming on this point. For years now I have been dealing with executives in our senior executive program at Harvard who come from dozens and dozens of countries, a program which now has about 320 people in it every year. Seventy percent of these executives are non US. I have told them about effective leaders in the US, the UK, South Africa, Japan, China, etc. I have shown them the critical similarities. What is interest ing is that before I talk, before I spend a day with these executives, many ask
me if I am only going to talk about American leadership—the implication being that American leaders are not relevant or have marginal relevance to them back in Russia (or wherever they are from). Yet, at the end of the day with me, no one raises the question again. They conclude that core aspects of leadership are not culture-specific. And I have seen this for 12 years or more with that executive group at Harvard, at least that long with more junior executive groups at Harvard, as well as when talking to top management at international corporations which have a third of their executives from outside the US. What according to you should be the role of an organization in nurturing and developing the leadership talent within the company? GE has always been known as a factory of CEOs. What should other companies do to produce the high quality leadership? All the evidences I have is that the best organizations which is to say those organizations that not only perform well today but are able to sustain that performance over time, growing great returns to investors, great products and services for people, etc.—either explicitly or a bit intuitively try to nurture the future leadership potential they have. Somebody, sometimes a CEO, understands this and watches over Interview 4 managers personally as well as encourages others to do. More often I think it is intuitive that senior people just know that at a gut
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more important in the future. We can no longer afford organizational cultures that send off signals that leadership is only the role of the person at the top of hierarchy, and that leadership is not my job.
Interview
level this is important. So they conduct themselves accordingly. In the very best organizations, they focus on the leadership potential of a few people at the top but to middle management and sometimes all the way down to the supervisors and those people who do not have individuals officially reporting to them. They say that leadership is a part of your job. Your said career will not blossom unless you pay attention to that part of the job. Staff can play an explicit role here, usually but not entirely, as a part of the training function, where the training people understand that they have to focus explicitly on leadership. Also, whoever has responsibility for performance appraisal and succession planning can help too. They can make sure that leadership is not ignored, make sure that more than managerial behaviors are built into performance appraisal or into the evaluation of whether people have potential for moving into higher positions. They can make sure that management is not mistaken for leadership. And I think role modeling is especially important. Leaders make themselves visible to others. They don’t just hide in their offices talking to other executives. They make sure that as many employees as possible can see somebody who is not just a good manager or a good technical person in the sense of being great at marketing or manufacturing, but someone who demonstrates what leadership is all about. Anyway, explicitly or implicitly, one would largely conclude that these efforts at nurturing leadership talent will even be
In most MBA curricula, leadership may be just one of the many courses offered. Should a course in leadership be made mandatory at business schools? The answer is clearly ‘Yes’. If you have only one or two elective courses in leadership and all of the rest of the curriculum plus all other activities that happen around, and students in an MBA program fundamentally ignore the leadership issues, then you have a problem. I think MBA programs need to think clearly about what they are trying to do. What is their vision of their graduates 5 or10 or 20 or 30 years after graduation? What are they trying to do to help influence students in terms of the development of their own careers, in terms of skills that they can immediately apply, in terms of the skills they tell them that they must develop later? If the program honestly thinks leadership has very little to do with this, then I think maybe having a single course might be adequate. But how can that be true? There must be more activities going on that at least implicitly encourage people to start developing their own leadership potential, that give students the opportunity to see good leadership, for example, by bringing in speakers from the outside that are not just good managers but clearly know something about leadership. 13
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Outsiders don’t even need to talk directly of leadership if they demonstrate in their behavior what the business of leadership is. So, to summarize, there is no question that leadership needs to be an important part of an MBA curriculum, and I think it needs to be infused into the culture of MBA program as well. Do you think, with most of the business school students not having work experience, that a leadership course can be taught while they are MBA students or should this be done later in executive development programs? I think the answer is both—in the MBA program and in executive programs. You would approach the topic differently depending on whether it is a young man or woman, who had a little or no business experience, or it is a 40- year-old manager. For example, without any leadership experience there are many things that are simply not going to be appreciated and understood because students do not have the context to understand what is being taught. Showing them things that they can’t quite understand or giving them information that will inevitably go in and out of the short-term memory will obviously be a waste of time. Nevertheless, you can do a few things even with young people. You can help them intellectually understand what leadership is and why is it more important nowadays. You can get them to pay more attention to the development of their own leadership skill in their early careers. In executive education, if it is not just a narrow
course on IT, for example, leadership should be much more built into the program. The students can handle more, ask better questions, etc. Give it to them. How should a very successful leader plan for his succession? Should the successor be chosen by the board or the successful leader? It has to some degree be both. If someone has been a terrific leader at the top of an organization, and he or she is not insecure, it is only natural that as a part of their legacy that they will want to make sure their organization does not collapse after Interview 5 they leave. If they are insecure, they might like to let the firm collapse to demonstrate to others how great they were. Leaders who have maturity and security will, in their final years, pay a lot of attention to people who might succeed them. They will do so not just as a part of a once-a-quarter succession planning meeting but constantly, every day of the year. A board’s role is to demand that the CEO put succession on the board agenda not just a year before he/she is going to retire, but starting at least 3 or 4 years before retirement. And a good Board will not have short discussions on succession once a year. Their job is to listen to what the current CEO has to say, ask questions about what he and other people in the firm are doing to develop talent, listen to who he/she thinks is on the long list of people that might be the next CEO, and through those many discussions judge whether sufficient activity is going on
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What are your comments on succession planning at Nike, Southwest airlines and British petroleum? My answers would have to be based on data that I can’t have total faith in. I try not to talk about things that I don’t clearly understand. That’s just the way I look at the world. Although I have some thoughts on all three of these situations, it would be too much speculation and I don’t like speculation. If you have to make a list of top 10 business leaders in the last century, who would they be? If we are talking about a CEO of an established and sizeable firm, the best business leader in the last quarter of the 20th century in the world by far is Jack Welch. There are others that have done a very good job, but Welch has done a terrific job. He is number one by some distance. If you talk about business leaders who were entrepreneurs, who started with nothing and then grew organizations, I might pick Herb Kelleher at Southwest airlines. Mr. Kelleher is about as good as you get in terms of an entrepreneur who is not only a good businessman but also a good business leader. If you move back earlier in the 20th century, one great business leader was a man of whom I wrote a biography. He
started his business around 1917 and was associated with it until he died in the late 1980s. He was Konosuje Matsushita. This is the man whose firm has products sold under labels like National, Panasonic, JVC, Technics, Quasar. In terms of being both an entrepreneurial leader and a leader of a significant size business, he was astonishing. He was astonishing not just as a Japanese businessperson but a corporate leader anywhere. I can say that with some confidence, because I spent a good deal of time digging into his story, talking to people who know him well, and reading his writings.
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in between their infrequent board meetings so that there will not be a problem at the last moment. CEO’s and their Boards too often either ignore succession until the last minute or do a poor job of handling this important challenge.
Still others—from about 1917- 1918 until about 1960, Thomas Watson who provided extraordinary leadership at IBM. He was given, by financial backers, three small companies. He merged them, changed the name of the firm to International Business Machines, and built an incredible business. Another great entrepreneurial leader in the last quarter of the last century was Sam Walton. If you watch videotapes of him talking to people and stories about him from people who knew him well, you find he had an outstanding capacity to create visions, communicate them, and inspire his people. The Interview was conducted by Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary, Consulting Editor, Effective Executive and Dean, Icfai Business School Case Development Center, Hyderabad.
Bron: www.ibscdc.org
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Making Change Happen:
An Interview with John Kotter John P. Kotter has been an advocate and chronicler of business change ever since he joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1972. Since then, he’s authored more than 20 books, including Leading Change, the bestseller named management book of the year in 1996. His articles in Harvard Business Review alone have sold more than a million and a half copies. And Business Week rated Kotter the No. 1 “leadership guru” in America, based on a survey the magazine conducted among more than 500 enterprises.
Change is the very heart of an organization’s business success, Kotter believes. That longheld belief is evident in his latest book, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), which he co-authored with Dan S. Cohen of Deloitte Consulting. The new book reviews the principles of successful change outlined in his earlier works and then adds an important new dimension—a look at how large-scale change actually happens, using real-life examples from a variety of business sectors.In Kotter’s view, business strategy, organizational structure, and systems play
a role in any change management initiative. But they’re all secondary to the single most important ingredient—changing people’s behavior. This is done most effectively through a “see-feel-change” process, the author and educator says. People need to almost literally see a problem or opportunity, feel the need to respond, and then change their behavior to resolve the problem or seize the opportunity. Kotter’s insights will no doubt resonate with supply chain professionals, who are being called upon to pull off some of the most
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Q: Why is successful change management so important at this particular time? A: How well companies manage change is important at any point in time. Reflecting on this over a period of 30 years, I’ve found that the rate of change simply keeps going up. And it hasn’t been a step function. It’s not as if, all of a sudden in 1997, change spiked because of Factor X. Or, in 2001 we saw a major business change because of Factor Y. Instead, in a jagged way, it’s just been going up, and up, and up for all kinds of fundamental macroeconomic and technical reasons. There is no evidence that this will do anything but continue. Companies will always have to deal with change. Looking at some of the major drivers of change today, we have globalization of the economy, which promises only to continue. The same holds true for technology, another major driver. And even if one technology sector collapses, another will take its place. Look at what is happening in biotech these days. So even though you will see slowdowns in various sectors and in different regions, there is a relentless march forward that creates a more interdependent world—and more change. Even the littlest event in one part of the economy creates bubbles of change in
another. The most visible event in the past year, of course, was on the sociopolitical front. The horrors of Sept. 11 will continue to produce more and more bubbles of change that we need to figure out how to cope with. So my answer to the question is that the pace of change keeps increasing because of some fundamental factors—and it’s going to continue this way. How skilled we are at handling that becomes all-important. And people who don’t “get it” increasingly will find themselves in trouble.
Interview
far-reaching change initiatives in American business today. His message to these leaders is an important one: By keeping a few basic principles in mind and by learning from the success of others, you can be a successful change leader—and in the process make a powerful contribution to the success of your organization. Supply Chain Management Review Editor Francis J. Quinn interviewed Kotter recently in Cambridge, Mass.
Q: When our readers launch a supply chain initiative they often run up against certain well-entrenched functional silos within their organizations. How do you overcome a silo mentality and start making real progress toward change? A: First off, you need to recognize that where change has to cut across these kinds of silos in an organization, you’re dealing with a very tough challenge. On a scale of 1 to 100 in such situations, most of us are at the 25 level. And when you’re at 25, it’s exasperating! You start to throw up your hands and wonder if you’ll get beyond that. But if you can get up to the 75 level, say, you’ll start to notice the difference. My book includes a story about a company that made that kind of progress. It has to do with the purchasing of gloves in a multidivisional organization. (See the sidebar for an excerpt of the glove story.) The individual leading this initiative was dealing across very independent divisions in this company. And here he is, a corporate guy, who probably isn’t looked at with a lot of warmth, who gets the ball rolling. This individual got the different managers to look beyond their individual “silos” and see the importance of working toward change in a 17
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specific supply management activity. He used a compelling visual object—over 400 gloves stacked on a boardroom table—that people could actually see, touch, and feel. This is one important illustration in a whole set of ideas that we talk about to help managers break down the silos and take on those really tough change problems. Q: Is that 25 level typically the first big hurdle companies need to clear? A: Yes, I think it’s typical and it mostly relates to a lack of experience and skills in producing meaningful change. No doubt many people reading this are frustrated because they see a problem, and they have been trying to work on it. And the problem isn’t some trivial thing, either. It requires some significant change, usually involving a number of different people, quite possibly in different silos, who are just as frustrated. Usually, the problem is not impossible to solve. It is just that most of us haven’t had that much practice in leading change, we don’t have that much insight into the problem, we haven’t had many stories that show us what is possible. Q: Many change initiatives in the supply chain space necessarily involve external partners. It’s tough enough getting your own organization to change. How do you get people on the outside to do so? A:I really think it’s the same process. It has nothing to do with inside/outside. It’s getting enough people on your side and on their side to feel some sense of urgency that we ought to do something, that we both have to overcome this complacent attitude of, “What’s the problem? Everything’s working fine.” Successful change always starts with
pulling together a couple of people who are appropriate for driving the initiative—people within your organization and at the partnering company who have insight into the change initiative and a strong sense of urgency. From this informal kind of collaboration, you begin to move down the stages—create urgency, build the team, set the vision, get the idea out to enough people, and so forth. That process is as valid in dealing across the organization as it is inside of it. Q: How do you get people to become emotionally involved in what might seem to be a relatively unemotional change, such as installing new transportation or procurement software? A: Education. Education has striven for centuries to build up the rational side of our brain—and there have been good reasons for that. But in the process, we have become more and more convinced that the only way you do things is the analytical way, what I refer to as the “analysis-think-change” approach. You know, give me all the figures, we’ll see how they add up, and then we’ll do something about it. We forget that there’s a whole other side of the brain that we need to be educated about and that people have feelings about even the most mundane stuff. New software? Oh, no! Some people are scared to death about what that new little system is going to do to them and their jobs. Then there are those who arrogantly think, why the hell do we need this? People have deep feelings about these kinds of things. The challenge is to start maneuvering those feelings in a way that will make successful change happen and help the organization do the right thing. You can do something dramatic and
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compelling even with the dullest subject if you approach it the right way. Instead of the analysis-think-change approach, you follow a “see-feel-change” process that I talk about in my book. That’s exactly what the person in the glove story did. Q: Can you teach people change management skills or is it something that just has to come from within? A: I don’t know about these skills being taught. Again, successful change management is more than “Get me the data, do the analysis, and here are six reasons why we have to change”—all of which can be taught. It begins with an insight that we have to do something, that we really need to change. Then that insight is shared with others in a compelling way that helps them visualize the problem. This approach helps knock down those emotions that block change and accepts those that propel it forward and make something happen. But it all starts with the fundamental insight. Q: What about the team aspect of change management? What qualities make an effective team? A: Ultimately, a good team consists of people who are genuinely willing to work together to solve a problem and bring about change. That means you don’t have games going on, you don’t have people worrying more about how they can look good than working to solve the problem. Now, having said that, we all know that it can be tough to build this kind of team. Step 2 (Build the Guiding Team) is a big deal that demands a lot of attention. Yet people sometimes run by that step and it gets them into trouble. All kinds of things
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affect whether or not the team members will work together well. It helps enormously to have a central person who feels passionate about the problem and has reasonably good relationships with the other team members. He becomes a magnet, in a sense, that pulls all the atoms together. Don’t overlook the mechanical things involved in building a team—they make a big difference in success or failure. Take the very mechanical question of meeting format. How often do you meet and for how long? Is there a clear agenda that is followed? If the meeting structure is flawed, people will start worrying about themselves, not about the problem. Once you start heading in that direction, you’re set on a dreadful course. People start playing this game of “How can I show up late for meetings, How can I get out early, and so on?” Q: Let’s say you have an individual on the team—the purchasing manager who has been buying products the same way for 30 years, the transportation manager who’s been using the same carriers for all his life—who doesn’t want to change. They are obviously frustrating progress. How do you deal with that situation? A: First off, you have to stop and ask whether these individuals have really got beyond Step 1—that is, do they have the sense of urgency? Because very often it’s not a Step 2 problem of effective team building, but rather a Step 1 problem of urgency. People may lack a sense of urgency for any number of reasons. They may believe, for example, that the world is fine, so why are we even talking about this change project in the first place. Or they might complain that we went through the same deal three years ago; it
didn’t work then, so why should it work now. Or they could just be insecure. Someone who is 60 years old and three or four years from retirement understandably might be insecure over where this whole change thing is headed. Whatever the reason, though, you just cannot afford to have “unurgent” people on the team. Q: And if they can’t or won’t develop that sense of urgency? A: Then you have a decision to make: Do you want successful change, or do you want to let Harry bully everyone into his version of the world. It’s pretty straightforward, but it can be difficult. Very often the people not buying into the program have their own power bases in the organization. Very often, too, you will have had a long relationship with these individuals. What great leaders will do is to sit down with Harry and have a straightforward conversation. They will say, “We know how much you have contributed to the company over the years, so let’s get that off the table right away. We are talking future here, okay, and we have got this problem. Harry, my friend, you are part of the problem. So, you have to help me figure out how we deal with that because we are going to deal with it.” Q: You talk about time being of the essence in change initiatives. How do you act expeditiously without acting rashly? A: I always say you have to act with enormous urgency and patience! Now that sounds contradictory. But if you think about it, it really isn’t. Change requires a relentless sense of “We’ve got to keep moving forward.” At the same time, the patience part means that things have to be done right. Slipshod
20 MBA in één dag | John Kotter
Q: Is change more effective when it’s driven from the top or when it percolates up from the bottom? A:I don’t think you can make a generalization about that. Change tends to involve lots of people at lots of levels, and who initiates change at any one time can vary. So, at one point, you might have three or four people at the top of the chain who keep things driving forward. Then a month later, it’s these 50 people at the middle who are doing something. Then it’s back to the four people at the top, and then it’s a small task force nine levels down. So in this sense, change really moves more like a wave as opposed to moving downward or upward. Q: Where does empowerment fit in the change process? Your view on this seems to differ from the conventional notion. A: Empowerment means, ultimately, making people more powerful. And one of the ways you make people more powerful is by not requiring them, for example, to move this chair from here to the next room by pushing it through the wall! In other words, you empower people to do something—move a chair, build a new supply chain—by removing the barriers that will keep them from succeeding. When people think of empowerment as just giving people rights, they lose sight of an important fact: If you just give them rights without removing the barriers, they won’t succeed. Here’s an example: We’ve got a new vision for the plant, and it is to operate in teams
around equipment areas, as opposed to the conventional way we have done it in the past. Somebody says, “We have got to empower the teams to be able to do this and that.” Then management tells the teams what needs to be done, informs them that they are empowered to do the job, and then walks away. Of course, the whole thing collapses after six weeks because these people don’t have the skills to do the work in a team environment—there’s no support structure around them, no way for them to gain the requisite skills. The issue is less about giving people authority to do something than it is about removing the barriers that prevent them from doing it. And in this case, the main barrier was a lack of skills. These individuals had no team skills because they had been brought up in a different world. The key empowering action here would be for management to give them the right skills so that they could work successfully in the new team environment. That’s really how you empower people.
Interview
work and cutting corners up front will only come back to snap at you in the long run. It’s not a trade-off. You can hold both thoughts—urgency and patience—in your head at the same time.
Q: You emphasize the importance of shortterm wins in the change process. A: Short-term wins are a big deal; they build momentum. Plus, they help you get past all the skeptics, all those people who want to resist change. In the book, I also note that not all wins—short term, or otherwise—are equal. The more visible the win, the more it contributes to the change process. The best wins are unambiguous and meaningful, too. They clearly and directly speak to employee issues, concerns, and values—and in doing so, help the change process greatly. Q: Some of our readers may feel a little insecure about assuming a leadership role 21
MBA in één dag | John Kotter
in a change-management effort. What can they do to step up to the challenge and better position themselves for success? A: Well, I can mention a couple of things, which may not necessarily be in the right order of importance. First, if you are frustrated, recognize that you are among millions of people who are similarly frustrated. But don’t start drawing the conclusion that you can’t do much about this. It’s not true. We have lots of cases where people like you have persevered through the early frustration and done something rather dramatic. Second, don’t blame yourself. Don’t think, “Oh my God, I will never develop this kind of unique skill.” In almost every case, the problem is simply a lack of experience— you haven’t been through one of these major change initiatives before. You need to learn the basics of successful change management and have your people learn them, too. That’s the foundation for success. Related to that, it doesn’t hurt to find people who have gone through similar changes successfully and figure out how to tap into them. This could be someone you meet at your local association meeting or at a business conference. You strike up a conversation about the change project, develop some kind of personal relationship, and start learning from this person. Or it could be someone you hire into the organization who’s been successful at implementing change at another company. But the main thing for your readers to remember is that
problems on their hands—changes that if they did well could make a big difference to their companies. Now some of the big strategy guys may not think that the supply chain is at the center of the universe. But they’re missing the point. If companies can change their current supply chain systems to something that’s truly leading edge, it can mean huge dollars for their companies. And it even goes beyond that. How well you manage that change helps determine how fast or slow you can move to execute a new business strategy, operate in a new country, open new plants. It’s a huge deal!By managing change successfully, supply chain managers can really make a tremendous contribution to their company—and they should think that way too.
Bron: Supply Chain Management Review, december 2002
they absolutely can lead a successful largescale change effort in their organization. Q: Any final thoughts? A: Well, I can’t believe that supply chain people don’t have some awfully important change 22 MBA in één dag | John Kotter
‘MBA in één dag’ staat onder de bevlogen leiding van bestsellerauteur en toptrainer Ben Tiggelaar. Ben verzorgt sprankelende seminars waarin hij ‘inhoud’ en ‘vorm’ op een perfecte manier samenbrengt. Een dag Tiggelaar is beslist géén luierdag: Ben hanteert een hoog tempo en presenteert ontzettend veel inzichten, eyeopeners en praktische tips. Hij brengt zijn verhaal daarnaast op een bevlogen, enthousiaste en interactieve manier, waardoor u toch de hele dag op het puntje van uw stoel zit.
Reacties Dit zeggen deelnemers over Ben Tiggelaars ‘MBA in één dag’... “Met een TGV door managementland!” Martijn Kamp, Getronics PinkRoccade “Waanzinnig interessant. Een waardevolle vertaalslag van zoveel ‘guru’ informatie.” Marinus van der Steen, Ministerie van Defensie “Hier heb ik jaren naar uitgekeken! Geweldige opstap naar verdere verdieping. Uitermate motiverend om een stapje terug te doen van de day-to-day brandblusmomenten.” Karel Burger, Nielsen Nederland “Bomvol. Genoeg ideeën opgedaan om komend jaar mee vooruit te kunnen.” Marie Jose Klaren, Universiteit Leiden “Beste scholing van de laatste vijf jaar!” A. Janse, Chr. Scholengemeenschap Vincent van Gogh “Super. Volledige overview. Ultrasnel. Precies zoals ik het wilde.” Aad van den Boogaart, Aranea Consult
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