Penguins illustrate how to conquer change

0 Comments | USA TODAY, October, 2006 | by Michelle Archer

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions By John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber, art by Peter Mueller St. Martin's Press, 147 pages, $19.95 --- At first glance, Our Iceberg Is Melting seems easy to dismiss as an attempt to fuse a few hot topics -- global warming, marching penguins -- into a Who Moved My Cheese? fable-as-business-lesson best seller.

But this penguin parable has a pedigree in the form of Harvard Business School's John Kotter, author of Leading Change, the 1996 business guide that also sported our flat-footed, feathered friends on the cover. The Heart of Change was his 2002 follow-up. This time out, Kotter moves the penguins inside, using how a colony of them copes with a potential catastrophe -- yes, their iceberg is melting -- to...