Ari Betof

With the eight-step Kotter Change Model, management and strategy expert John Kotter has given us one of the best and most practical models for building successful and sustainable organizations over the long term.  

In a nutshell, the eight essential steps to planning for and implementing change are: 

• Creating a sense of urgency 
• Forming a powerful guiding coalition 
• Creating a vision 
• Communicating the vision 
• Empowering others to act on the vision 

• Planning for and creating short-term wins 
• Consolidating improvements and producing still more change 
• Institutionalizing new approaches 

You can divide these eight steps into three phases:  

• Preparing a climate receptive to change 
• Bringing your entire organization on board with change  
• Implementing and cementing the desired change  

From this perspective, the creation of a vision stands out as the third step in the initial phase, helping you to move into the second phase in which you’ll communicate that vision to a broader group. 

You won’t transform your organization without a vision  

Creating a vision may sound relatively simple to achieve. Some leaders may feel they can cut corners by breezing through it. For many organizations, however, it’s one of the most challenging steps on the pathway to implementing change. 

In articulating that vision, you’ll need to delineate precisely how the future of your organization will be different than its past, and you’ll need to do this in a way that will excite stakeholders at every level and secure their buy-in. This buy-in is key to building out the initiatives and processes that will transform vision into reality.  

Tapping into the sense of urgency that’s now empowering your guiding coalition, you’ll create a vision to serve as the foundation for the change to follow. This involves an investment of everyone’s time and energy in debating, negotiating, and forming agreements as you think carefully about what you want to achieve. At this stage, you are figuring out what change looks like. The result will also show you and your team why it’s so important to make that change happen. 

The practical results of creating a vision 

Kotter notes that a clear and definable vision moves you forward in three important ways. It helps build on the initial sense of urgency, galvanizing people to take the first—sometimes difficult—steps in the needed direction; it serves to guide and calibrate the actions of each key team member to those of the rest of the team; and it provides the foundation for the way you’ll want to frame strategies and make decisions going forward.  

When Kotter outlines the characteristics of a well-crafted vision, he focuses on the following: 

• Making the vision easy for stakeholders to imagine 
• Desirable in the eyes of these stakeholders 
• Realistic in terms of its goals 
• Clear and easy to follow 

• Nimble and responsive to changing conditions 
• Simple to summarize 
• Easy to explain  

You’re looking for an elevator pitch, but one into which you’ve poured a lot of in-depth thinking, strategizing, collaborating, and word-smithing.  

It’s not too much to say that a clear, well-articulated, action-oriented vision provides everyone on your team with the sense of meaning you need to keep any change project on track.  

The power of sustained communication 

Communication is one of the most important aspects of nourishing the vision for the change you want to see. Effective communication is the action that will move you into the second phase, when you are bringing your whole organization on board as change ambassadors, clearing away barriers, and enjoying milestones that mark your progress. 

Without effective communication of your vision, you’ll find yourself hard-pressed to gain the buy-in you need to sustain the change. Kotter notes that expert change leaders identify and utilize every type of communication channel available to them. They also take up the mantle of change, remembering what the advertising world knows so well: the value of regular repetition to form habits of thinking and encourage follow-through. 

Storytelling should be a key component of the communication of your vision. Personal, relatable stories make abstract concepts like “change” more real. Stories also speak the universal language of emotion, loyalty, and belonging. 

Be the vision for the change you want to see 

One potential pitfall here is if you yourself fail to be the change. You need to walk the walk and do the work alongside your team, or you won’t get the buy-in you need. Unless you make it clear that you’re doing the necessary work on yourself that you’re asking them to do—and this includes facing up to doubts and uncertainties and expanding your worldview—you risk losing any trust you’ve worked to build up. Morale could plummet, and with it your goal of making lasting, positive change. 

As experts in Kotter’s change model have pointed out, change management is ultimately more about influencing people than anything else. For that change to take effect, you and your team at every level of your organization need the power of a vision that will inspire you.  

As Kotter himself has said, developing the right vision for your organization is a big step. It requires time, care, and regular, honest communication with multiple people. It is nothing less than “an exercise of both the head and the heart.”  

John Kotter’s eight-step change model continues to influence some of the most forward-looking businesses, nonprofits, and government organizations in the world. Most recently the author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times (Wiley, 2021), Kotter remains a leadership expert’s leadership expert.  

A professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, John Kotter has guided research and provided consulting services that have transformed major international corporations, including those challenged by the need to help teams embrace change and thrive during the transition to a digital environment.  

A practical and inspirational plan for change 

The classic Kotter change model asks organizations to:  

1.   Create a sense of urgency 

2. Build a guiding coalition  

3. Communicate the vision of change 

4. Communicating the vision 

5. Enable action by removing barriers 

6. Generate short-term wins 

7. Consolidating Gains 

8. Anchoring change in the culture 

A guiding coalition gets you where you want to go 

After a leader has ignited a sense of urgency within an organization and created a desire for change among employees, Kotter moves into the second factor: building an effective guiding coalition to promote change from within an organization’s ranks.  

So what exactly is a “guiding coalition” in the universe of change management? 

It’s a group of knowledgeable, highly effective staff drawn from within an organization who can use their social and professional capital to help plan for change and encourage buy-in at every level.  

No one executive can do it alone when it comes to implementing and cementing innovative strategies. To neglect this insight is to fail to understand that power in any organization is distributed among stakeholders at multiple rungs on the hierarchical ladder.  

A guiding coalition is a network of respected, energetic, and insightful internal experts who can move from the urgency of the first step in the change model to making positive change happen in the real world. Ideal coalition members also possess the experience and credibility to engage, persuade, and cultivate others throughout the organization. As the team at Kotter International sometimes likes to say, it’s not so much that “it takes a village,” as that “it takes a guiding coalition.” 

Who do you want on your guiding coalition? 

Experienced leaders in and outside Kotter International note that diversity is the first thing to look for in a guiding coalition. You want a group that incorporates a mix of distinct job titles, experiences, backgrounds, skill sets, and viewpoints. This will give you the advantage of a 360-degree view of any issue. Diverse groups have also shown themselves more capable of pushing past conventional wisdom and groupthink to produce relevant and innovative ideas.  

You also want a guiding coalition that is notable for its enthusiasm and is well-stocked with people unafraid to think for themselves and outside conventional lines.  

In selecting members of any guiding coalition, focus on actions rather than perceived “innate” personality characteristics. You will want to avoid automatic naysayers, those who place their immediate gain over the group’s success, and those who lack focus and thus might run creative efforts into the weeds. You want to only invite people who have earned the trust of their teammates and who have demonstrated an ability to check their egos at the door.  

Draw most members of the coalition from within the ranks of front-line staff and middle managers rather than allowing it to become top-heavy with executives. While you need some level of executive representation, choose members based on demonstrated leadership achievements at their level. 

While championing change starts at the top of an organization, it won’t gain sufficient traction without participation from middle management, front-line staff, and workers at every level. 

Making your guiding coalition work 

You’ll want to be sure the guiding coalition you’ve invested time and thought into creating can fulfill its mission. Make sure to provide your guiding coalition members with a solid foundation from which they can get moving quickly. To do this, you’ll need to give this team the authority to work beyond existing barriers and hierarchies. They should report their change recommendations directly to you or another designated executive team member. You can additionally bolster their cohesiveness and effectiveness as a working group by facilitating off-site retreats or other team-building sessions.  

Give the guiding coalition the scope and power to lead the change efforts you want while staying out of their way as they execute the strategy you want.  

At the same time, you must be sure the coalition stays focused and on target. You’ll need to stay engaged with its activities and be available to communicate regularly with its members. Your presence will also be needed to serve as a counterweight to the inevitable pushback the coalition will receive from others within the organization.  

A picture of success 

United Way of Metropolitan Dallas (UWMD) is one of the many success stories among Kotter International clients. UWMD’s traditional employee-giving campaign structure was foundering. Looking to better engage donors at a time when opportunities for self-directed giving began to flourish, UWMD asked Kotter for help in changing its operational model. Building a guiding coalition was at the center of this change effort.  

Thanks to the energetic response of coalition members, UWMD was able to identify previously untapped leadership within its ranks and support new talent that offered innovative solutions.  

Coalition members tried out potential ways of revitalizing the organization’s increasingly irrelevant “community chest” fundraising strategy, and in the process broke UWMD out of its rut. Among other achievements, it implemented a social innovation division for building community connections and directing funds to emerging enterprises focused on social welfare issues. UWMD also succeeded in transforming its organizational culture, fostering greater staff engagement, and achieving its most successful fundraising year ever.  

In The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future (PublicAffairs, 2022), author, entrepreneur, social policy scholar, and personal development expert Julia Hobsbawm provides us with an exploration at the reinvention of work post-COVID-19. The book resulted from Hobsbawm’s deep conversations with leaders across industries and demographics, as well as her insights and practical advice on how we should be navigating this pivotal moment in the history of humankind and how we work. 

Known for her previous titles in this sphere, such as Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) and The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World (Kogan Page, 2020), the British-born Hobsbawm has received several awards. Readers have profited from reading her incisive, data-driven, and deeply thought-out books.  

Reviewers have praised The Nowhere Office as a catalyst for long-lasting and profound changes in the way we work, as well as for its conciseness and readability. Forbes called it “required reading” for anyone strategizing the next steps in the reinvention of their workplace. Whether one considers the COVID-19 pandemic waning or transitioning from pandemic to endemic, Hobsbawm offers a thoughtful perspective. 

The pandemic brought change to a head 

The Nowhere Office starts on the premise that the “traditional” office space we all know so well was likely already on its way to extinction even before the COVID-19 pandemic.  

There were three major factors at play in this. One factor was technology. The build-out of automation pre-COVID had already given us a situation unique in history in terms of our ability to work remotely. The potential shift of much of our working life into the “metaverse,” in which virtual worlds have become, as Hobsbawm puts it, “far more real” than anyone had thought possible, promises to make this state of affairs even more vital to the way we work.  

But for Hobsbawm, today’s “relentless” development of our ability for automating our jobs through ever-evolving technologies has left us chronically stressed while not yet clearly paying dividends boosting productivity.  

Another of these tipping-point drivers was the world of politics. Hobsbawm zeroes in on problems involving what she defines as “inequality and sustainability.”  

The other factor is social, and it involves our developing multi-generational workforce. Generation Z—anticipated to make up more than a quarter of the world’s workforce by the year 2025—shares office space with baby boomers, Generation Xers, and millennials.  

A crucible of change 

The transformational mix of these elements came together during the pandemic, fueling the realization that many people no longer need to be physically present in a traditional office to get the core of their work done.  

One recent study showed that more than one-third of all Americans can do their jobs entirely remotely. Another 23 percent have received offers from their employers to work from home at least part of the time. If they were given the chance to work remotely, a full 87 percent of employees responding said they’d take it.  

The presence of Gen Z in the workplace as COVID hit also likely helped us realize that work can and should be more meaningful and useful than it has been for many in the past. Instead of simply clocking in every day and drawing a paycheck, this youngest generation in our workforce is prompting  society to ask questions such as, “How much does our work contribute to our genuine well-being as full human beings?” and “Does our work have a clear and constructive purpose?” 

A transformation of needs and roles 

As Hobsbawm shows, the traditional office grew up around the role of middle managers, who, taking instruction from the executive level, told their front-line teams how they were going to build a product or solve a problem. But these same mid-level job functions also helped create an increasingly complex workplace bureaucracy. Now, remote teams are finding a crucial need to accomplish tasks like scheduling asynchronous teams in hybrid work environments. They’re also investing more in redefining what top performance means.  

Making work more human 

Hobsbawm’s emphasis here is the need to re-center the “human” in human resources. She wants corporations to focus more on their relationships with their teams and less on obsolete types of employee performance evaluations.  

With this goal in mind, she wants to see companies invest more resources into the training and development of their teams while supporting career-long learning. What would she minimize? The prioritization of values that amount to window dressing, such as “presenteeism,” and the creation of presentations designed solely to impress clients. She also wants employees who work at least part-time in brick-and-mortar offices to be able to work in urban business spaces that provide more residential and mixed-use opportunities to foster a more integrated work-life balance. 

Hobsbawm warns companies still unwilling to join these trends that emerging generations of potential employees are not likely to accept business as usual.  

Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg is a book by British journalist Paul Vallely that offers a fresh and comprehensive look at how major philanthropy has evolved throughout history and how it continues to evolve. Published by Bloomsbury Continuum in 2020, Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg generations of philanthropists and how the influence and passion projects of modern philanthropists are quietly remaking the world we live in.  

Read on for a dive into the ideas and insights presented in the book’s 700+ pages.  

Definitive and readable 

Over the book’s initial chapters, Vallely gives a chronological account of the progress of philanthropy, from ancient Greece and Rome to the barons of Silicon Valley. The next section offers analyses of topics in contemporary philanthropy, including co-branding with celebrity spokespeople, the effects of philanthropy on democratic norms, and the strong part philanthropy plays in international development. After these in-depth summaries, Vallely looks at how we can improve the way philanthropy works. 

According to London School of Economics professor emeritus John Gray, this is “the definitive book on philanthropy.” But it’s more than just a treatise. The New Yorker called it “highly readable.” 

Vallely draws on five years of research to present us with a comprehensive survey that covers the “ancient Greeks to the modern geeks.” He talks in detail about common areas of discussion in philanthropy while also examining specific issues that include the role of utopian ideals, political goals, and religious faith in motivating and supplying frameworks of charitable giving. He adds in discussions of how philanthropy plays out in terms of both the public and the private sector and its role in our rapidly globalizing world.  

“Reciprocal philanthropy” vs. “effective altruism” 

One of Vallely’s main contentions is that two distinct types of philanthropy have developed throughout history. First, there’s “reciprocal philanthropy,” which is driven by the heart and creates personal, emotion-rich connections between those who give and those who receive. Reciprocal philanthropy also centers on spreading funds and resources among a broad range of causes.  

Second, “effective altruism” involves using market forces to address big problems—climate change and pandemics, to give two especially pressing topics—through a plan of targeted giving on a large scale.  

According to Vallely, we find everyone from Aristotle to the chocolate merchant and social welfare champion George Cadbury on the “reciprocal” side of the ledger. Vallely highlights the perspective of Pope Francis as one of the best exemplars of this point of view in our day. The Pope has said that when giving charity to a person who has absolutely nothing in this world, it’s important to make the right gesture, to look the person in the eyes and take hold of their hands in respect of the fact that, soul-to-soul, we are all equals. 

Vallely’s representatives of the “effective altruism” camp include steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the hard-driving entrepreneur of the early 20th century whose name still adorns public libraries and charitable foundations throughout the country. The description also encompasses Bill and Melinda Gates, who have launched globally focused efforts to mitigate disease, extend high-quality health care to vulnerable people, and expand educational opportunities. As previewed in the book’s title, Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan’s charitable foundation—dedicated to leveraging technological know-how to solve problems relating to climate change, medicine, education, and social justice—bookends the examples of philanthropy in the modern age.  

In Vallely’s analysis, Zuckerberg’s and the Gateses’ practice of “philanthrocapitalism” differs from reciprocal philanthropy in that is much less about connection, relationship, and love, and more about efficient use of funds as a problem-solving mechanism.  

Modernizing an ancient perspective 

There’s plenty of good sense in the argument for efficiency: It allows a donor who has made a fortune developing a corporation to easily scale up their philanthropy to do the most good for the greatest number of people. “Philanthrocapitalists,” regardless of anyone’s personal opinion about them, can have a meaningful impact on issues ranging from literacy to COVID research. The flip-side of that argument, though, is that these wealthy donors should simply be paying their fair share of income taxes to allow their fellow citizens and elected representatives to decide how best to spend the money. 

Vallely ultimately advocates for reciprocal philanthropy as the neglected path we need to move toward. He presents an intriguing case for heart-driven acts of individual charity that branch out in as many directions as a donor’s interests. He posits that this type of giving provides the best complement to state-managed solutions to larger economic, scientific, and social problems.  

While acknowledging the usefulness of efforts like those of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he offers cogent criticism of the current emphasis on super-wealthy, well-known donors. In this light, he attempts to move readers to reconsider the value he sees in a community-based approach.  

Vallely intersperses interviews with contemporary philanthropists throughout his text. One of the best quotes, from banker and human rights champion John Studzinski, says that the core meaning of all philanthropy is “human dignity.” And that’s the meaning that Vallely has woven into the book itself.