Book Review

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

Reviewed by Stephen Kendrick

I found out about The Heart of Change from a colleague at Deloitte Consulting, where this book is highly respected as a guide to creating and managing innovation (trivia: Deloitte Consulting LLC is also a named copyright holder of this book).  It has provided me with a practical framework for creating support for change in an organization and then executing on that change.  The author, John P. Kotter, ranks as a highly influential figure in management literature, sometimes compared with authors like Deming and Carnegie.  He developed the book with Dan Cohen, a leader at Deloitte Consulting for fourteen years.

As project managers, we can thank Kotter’s approach for adding to our stakeholder management toolkit.  Our success often depends on reaching these people who are barraged every day with emails, meetings, tweets, Facebok posts, and the same flood of other information that we all receive.  According to The Heart of Change, we can cut through that noise by appealing to stakeholders’ feelings and emotions, as much as we appeal their sense of business and logic.

We have all faced a customer or colleague who is skeptical of the need for change.  The techniques in Heart of Change offer a way to consider these challenges and meet them in a meaningful way.  Kotter and Cohen describe change as an eight-step path, detailing each step with a chapter in the book.  The eight steps break down as follows:

1. Increase Urgency
2. Build the Guiding Team
3. Get the Vision Right
4. Communicate for Buy-In
5. Empower Action
6. Create Short-Term Wins
7. Don’t Let Up
8. Make Change Stick

The first step, Increase Urgency, represents the act of cutting through the noise and reaching key stakeholders.  He suggests creating a “dramatic visualization” of the problem to establish a visceral sense of urgency, which leads to changed behavior.  He refers to this as the “See-Feel-Change” model (contrasted with a more cerebral “Analysis-Think-Change” approach).

Kotter drinks his own medicine throughout this book (show, don’t tell) and the first example is no exception.  A manager begins a meeting by spilling 240 gloves onto a conference-room table, in front of company executives.  The intention of this act is to create that dramatic visualization (“See”), to generate a visceral sense of the supply chain problem (“Feel”) and gain executive stakeholder support for an initiative (“Change”).

Each proceeding step of the path consists of a similar type of explanation with multiple examples from various industries and types of change efforts, along with a one-page highlight at the end of the chapter.  This highlight page also reflects helpful “What works” and “What doesn’t work” sections.

Beyond being a very useful and informative text, I enjoyed reading it.  If I were to try to find something that could be done better, I might suggest reminding readers about the “boring” part of all this—developing the data on which rests this engaging story.  I would also enjoy seeing an example going through the entire lifecycle of a change process.  I found this video on YouTube, which fills that gap nicely.

Overall, I would recommend this text to all projects managers, as well as anyone who aspires to lead innovation in the workplace (or even beyond the workplace).

About the Reviewer

Stephen Kendrick has been managing the delivery of technology projects for about a decade.  He is new to the Portland area. 

You can find more information at his LinkedIn profile:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/skendrick1/