Buy The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

This is a powerful follow up to Harvard Business School professor, John Kotter's, excellent previous book, Leading Change. As the subtitle of this book describes, it's a collection of stories about how people throughout their organizations (most are not senior managers) bring about change by connecting with others emotionally. The stories show, once again, that we're creatures of emotion and not logic. We make decisions based on our feelings and then look for the evidence to support that.

Building on his well-known distinctions between management and leadership, John Kotter and his co-author Dan Cohen show that strong change leaders skip the PowerPoint presentations full of logical analysis, measurements, and bullet points. Rather they appeal to feelings with stories, metaphors, demonstrations, experiences, pilots, and the like to change behavior.

The authors explain,"Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All those elements, and others, are important. But the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings. This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an M.B.A sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought. Feelings then alter behavior sufficiently to overcome all the many barriers to sensible large-scale change. Conversely, in less successful cases, the seeing-feeling-changing pattern is found less often, if at all."

I read The Heart of Change after I wrote The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. One of the reasons I liked this book so much was because I had just constructed and started using a chart comparing Information versus Communication to illustrate the central management versus leadership theme of The Leader's Digest. The differences between Information and Communication sharply contrast managers and leaders. Managers push, leaders pull. Manager try to light a fire under people, leaders stoke the fire within. Managers focus on facts, leaders focus on feelings. Management is intellectual, leadership is emotional. Managers inform, leaders communicate.Get more detail about The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations.