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

Why is organizational change so hard? Because in order to make any transformation successful, you must change more than just the structure and operations of an organization?you need to change people’s 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 people’s 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 John Kotter’s international bestseller Leading Change.

Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale business 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 change?and 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 change and looking to build their leadership skills.

Published by Harvard Business Review Press.

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 firm’s first Global Change Leadership methodology and was the lead architect in the design of Deloitte’s 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.