Leading Change

Kotter's eight stage process for organisational change, drawn from studying transformations that stalled alongside ones that held. The stages run from establishing urgency and building a guiding coalition, through creating and communicating a vision and enabling people to act on it, to generating short term wins and anchoring the change in the culture. Each stage has a matching failure mode, so the book doubles as a diagnosis of where a change effort has become stuck. The argument that most efforts fail through declaring victory too early is the part practitioners return to. The 2012 edition adds a preface reflecting on what has changed since the original in 1996.