Life
John Paul Kotter was born in 1947 in San Diego. He studied at MIT and Harvard, and from 1972 taught at Harvard Business School, where he became Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership (now emeritus). He founded the consulting firm Kotter International.
Works
- What Leaders Really Do (HBR 1990) and A Force for Change (1990) - the classic distinction between management (coping with complexity) and leadership (coping with change); see leadership and management.
- Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (HBR 1995) and the book Leading Change (1996) - the eight-step model; see leading change.
- Our Iceberg Is Melting (2005, with Holger Rathgeber) - a penguin fable illustrating the change model.
- Accelerate (2014) - on a “dual operating system”: hierarchy combined with a network of engaged volunteers.
Significance
Kotter's model is one of the most widely used approaches to organisational change. Its main message - that change requires urgency, a coalition, a vision and anchoring in the culture - is also useful in communities and Church organisations. See vision, organisational culture.
Sources
J. P. Kotter, A Force for Change, Free Press 1990 J. P. Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press 1996 J. Kotter, H. Rathgeber, Our Iceberg Is Melting, St. Martin's Press 2005 J. P. Kotter, Accelerate, Harvard Business Review Press 2014 Harvard Business School, Faculty: John P. Kotter, hbs.edu