Synopses & Reviews
Moving beyond the process of changeWhy is change so hard? Because in order to make any transformation successful, you must change more than just the structure and operations of an organizationyou need to change peoples behavior. And that is never easy.
The Heart of Change is your guide to helping people think and feel differently in order to meet your shared goals. According to bestselling author and renowned leadership expert John Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen, this focus on connecting with peoples emotions is what will spark the behavior change and actions that lead to success. Now freshly designed, The Heart of Change is the engaging and essential complement to Kotters worldwide bestseller Leading Change.
Building off of Kotters revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale change can work. With real-life stories of people in organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and activated to overcome obstacles to changeand produce spectacular results. Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to get buy-in from their teams instead of creatively showing or doing something that appeals to their emotions and inspires them to spring into action. They call this the see-feel-change dynamic, and it is crucial for the success of any true organizational transformation.
Refreshingly clear and eminently practical, The Heart of Change is required reading for anyone facing the challenges inherent in leading change.
Review
“George Reed has written a penetrating study of the nature, persistence, and consequences of the phenomenon of ‘toxic leadership.’ This study goes well beyond academic analysis of toxic leadership and provides wise and practical suggestions for how best to deal with it from the perspective of superiors, peers, and subordinates.”—Martin Cook, Admiral James Bond Stockdale Chair of Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College and coeditor of the Journal of Military Ethics
Review
“A stunning work, detailing the problem [of toxic leadership] with data and anecdotes, but even more, it offers concise and helpful solutions at the institutional and individual level. An absolute must-read for army brass, policymakers, and the soldier suffering in a toxic environment.”—Georgia Sorenson, visiting research professor of leadership studies at Carey School of Law and inaugural chair and professor of transformational leadership at the U.S. Army War College
Review
“The military knows a lot about good leadership. That makes sense because they have studied it for so long. In this remarkable and interesting book, however, George Reed recounts the lessons the military teaches us about bad leadership.”—Ronald E. Riggio, Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and coeditor of Leader Interpersonal and Influence Skills: The Soft Skills of Leadership
Synopsis
If youve read John Kotters worldwide bestseller
Leading Change, this should be the next book on your list.
The Heart of Changenow with refreshed packagingis the engaging and practical follow-up to
Leading Change, unveiling a framework to help you implement the change Kotter talks about.
The authors argue that change initiatives fail because teams rely on the wrong informationtoo much data gathering and analysis instead of a creative approach that actually motivates useful action. In the book, Kotter and coauthor Dan Cohen illustrate how transformational change actually happens, using stories from more than 100 organizations to show what works. They introduce the see-feel-change dynamic to propel people into the action thats needed for true transformation.
Refreshingly frank and continuously useful, The Heart of Change will help your organization change successfully.
Synopsis
Bad or toxic leadership, abusive supervision, and petty tyranny in organizations are perennial issues. But to date, there has been little effort to examine the scope and nature of bad leadership in the military. Tarnished rectifies that lack of attention by defining the problems and suggesting possible solutions appropriate to the military’s unique structure and situation. Leadership is central to the identity of the U.S. military. Service academies and precommissioning processes have traditionally stressed the development of conscientious leaders of character. The services regularly publish doctrinal works and professional journal articles focusing on various aspects of leadership. Unsurprisingly, in most of those publications leadership is presented as a universally positive notion, a solution to problems, and something to be developed through an extensive and costly system of professional military education. Leadership expert George E. Reed, however, focuses on individual experiences of toxic leadership at the organizational level, arguing that because toxic leadership has such a detrimental impact on the military organizational culture, additional remediation measures are needed. Reed also demonstrates how system dynamics and military culture themselves contribute to the problem. Most significant, the book provides cogent advice and insights to those suffering from toxic leaders, educators developing tomorrow’s military leaders, and military administrators working to repair the current system.
About the Author
John P. Kotter is internationally regarded as the foremost authority on the topics of leadership and change. His is the premier voice on how the best organizations achieve successful transformations. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School and is cofounder of Kotter International, a leadership organization that helps Global 5000 company leaders accelerate the implementation of their most critical strategies and lead change in a complex, fast-moving business environment. John Kotter has authored eighteen books, twelve of them bestsellers. His works have been printed in over 150 foreign-language editions.
Dan S. Cohen is the CEO of Stuart Advisory Services Group and a retired partner of Deloitte Consulting LLP. He focuses on large-scale organizational transformation and strategic change, and has over thirty-five years of experience consulting to and working in industry. During his fifteen years at Deloitte, Cohen developed the firms first Global Change Leadership methodology and was the lead architect in the design of Deloittes Strategic Change methodology. In addition to his consulting work, Cohen has lectured on organizational behavior at Ohio State University, Miami University, the University of Detroit, and Southern Methodist University.