Other Books by John Kotter
School Administrator, January 2021


Several other books by John Kotter have important applications for school system leaders. Here’s what I see as their relevancy.

»A Sense of Urgency (2008). At least 70 percent of change initiatives fail. In this work, Kotter shows how to build and keep momentum for change.

»Leading Change (2012). Kotter delivers an eight-step process for proactive change leadership. This book changed the way I think about change, and it’s become the leading blueprint for successful change worldwide.

»The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations (2012). Changing behavior is hard. It’s about thinking and feeling. This work, co-authored with Dan S. Cohen, shows how to win hearts and minds in making successful change.

»Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World (2014). The pace of change continues to “accelerate.” Five-year plans are not enough. Accelerate provides five core principles for creating continuous, and successful, innovation.

»Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (2016). Co-authored with Holger Rathgeber, this slim volume captures Kotter’s eight-step change process in story form. The easy-to-read metaphor makes it easier to talk about needed changes in an organization.

»That’s Not How We Do It Here! A Story about How Organizations Rise and Fall — and Can Rise Again (2016). A short story, co-written with Holger Rathgeber, illustrates the principles in Accelerate. The summary at the end introduces the idea of continuous innovation as a way to overcome the common roadblock: “That’s not how we do it here!”

Kotter plans to publish a new book this summer addressing, he says, “how some people are today mobilizing others to create hard-to-imagine results despite the uncertainties, rapid change and volatility from COVID and many other sources.” It draws from brain science as the basis of a practical, emerging theory of change based on brain research, organizational studies and social anthropology.