Leading Change
John P. Kotter

It is widely recognised that organisations are under greater pressure than ever before to adapt to meet new conditions and challenges within their marketplaces. This has spawned many change management projects, reorganisations and strategic realignments. Most of these have failed.

This book takes a much-needed look at how the process of organisational change must operate if it is to have both short-term impact and long-term sustainability. At the core of the book, is a eight-step process:

• Establishing a sense of urgency
• Creating the guiding coalition
• Developing a vision and strategy
• Communicating the change vision
• Empowering broad-based action
• Generating short-term wins
• Consolidating gains and producing more change
• Anchoring new approaches in the culture

This is a quite deceptive book, in that at first glance the steps are self-obvious, and the writing style is light and informal. What became increasingly apparent to me, however, was that considerable thought had been put into constructing both the change process and the book itself.

Kotter has clearly distilled years of practical experience into this volume, and his approaches are both similar and radically different to past ideas. My expectation is that when I return to re-read the book in six months time, I will discover even more insights and useful ideas.

Putting this into the context of the fields in which I work: this should be required reading for anyone leading an intranet, content management or knowledge management project. The change management process outlined in this book provides an effective project management framework, as well as invaluable insight into the activities that will be required.

In other words: this book will help you to ensure that the cultural and process changes needed to make an intranet or CMS successful are actually achieved.

Overall score: 9/10