The Heart of Change - Book Review

School Administrator, Feb, 2003 by Perry Berkowitz

Assistant Professor of Education Leadership and Administration, College of Saint Rose, Albany, N.Y.

In the past few years we have enjoyed a spate of books about leadership. Researchers such as Stephen Covey, Michael Fullan, Tom Peters and Terry Deal have warned us that the era of top-down, command and control management is over. Today's books emphasize the need to develop healthy self-transforming organizations that empower the people within them to be able to succeed in a fast-moving world.

W. Edwards Deming's notion of continuous improvement has become the order of the day. In that light, the latest work of John P. Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, stands out. Kotter is the author of the 1996 best seller, Leading Change, which outlined his eight-step framework and the traps to avoid in seeing change through.

On this follow-up effort, he collaborated with Dan S. Cohen, a consultant with Deloitte and Touche, who conducted in-depth interviews at 90 organizations in the United States, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Kotter selected the most instructive 34 of them for The Heart of Change, which contains dozens of true stories of people involved in significant organizational change and illustrates how the eight steps have been applied by leaders in organizations large and small.

By sharing this book with colleagues, a school leader can easily stimulate rich discussion. What Kotter has discovered is that successful change strategies have at their core an emphasis on the feelings of the people within the organization. As he writes: "Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture or systems ... [C]hange happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings."

To help people see the need for new behaviors in their work settings, the author suggests the "see-feel-change" strategy. Kotter contrasts that sequence with the rarely successful "analysis-think-change" activities that have prevailed for so long in our schools and corporations.

The stories in The Heart of Change demonstrate clearly how the sequence works. The concluding chapter, "We See, We Feel, We Change: Feeling and Thinking," is nothing short of inspirational. This book's worth much more than its selling price.

(The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen, Harvard Business School Press, 2002, 189 pp., $20 hardcover)