Quotes from John P. Kotter

The steps are: establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, empowering a broad base of people to take action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing even more change, and institutionalizing new approaches in the culture.

We need to become less like an elephant and more like a customer-friendly Tyrannosaurus rex

If people think the boss is manipulating them to get them to work harder, it backfires.

We worry about appearing awkward in a presentation. But up to a point, most people seem to feel more comfortable with less-than-perfect speaking abilities. It makes the speaker more human - and more vulnerable, meaning he is less likely to attack our decisions or beliefs.

If you're overbooked, you can't manage pressing problems or even recognize they're pressing until too late.

We are always creating new tools and techniques to help people, but the fundamental framework is remarkably resilient, which means it must have something to do with the nature of organizations or human nature.

Innovation is kind of a sub-piece of change.

Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.

The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.

Tradition is a very powerful force.

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

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

People change what they do less because they are given an analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings.

In an ever changing world, you never learn it all, even if you keep growing into your 90s.

The world has 6 billion people and counting. We need to help 500 million people become better leaders so that billions can benefit.

The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.

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.

Many years ago, I think I got my first insight on how an incredibly diverse team can work together and do astonishing things, and not just misunderstand each other and fight.

Every organization goes through a lifecycle where they eventually lose their initial speed or agility at a strategic level.

Urgency is unbelievably important when you're talking about, not little changes, but big changes.

Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats?

True urgent leadership doesn't drain people. It does the opposite. It energizes them. It makes them feel excited.

Globalization is going to bring us closer and closer together across nations and technology you can't stop.

Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.