John Kotter

John Paul Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, an author, and the founder of Kotter International, a management consulting firm based in Seattle and Boston. He is a thought leader in business, leadership, and change.

Career
John Kotter is an emeritus from Harvard Business School where he started teaching in 1972. He is the founder of Kotter International, and started his business in 2010 with locations in Cambridge Massachusetts and Seattle Washington. He currently serves as Chairman of Kotter International alongside CEO, Rick Western, Chief Commercial Officer, Kathy Gersch, Chief Financial Officer, Tanya Kruger and many more.

Kotter is also an author, speaker, and entrepreneur in the lines of business and leadership.

Personal life
Kotter lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, Nancy Dearman. They have two children, Caroline and Jonathan.

Written work
Kotter is the author of 21 books, as listed below. 12 of these have been business bestsellers and two of which are overall New York Times bestsellers.



Successful change
In Leading Change (1996), and subsequently in The Heart of Change (2002), Kotter describes an eight stage model of successful change in which he seeks to support managers to lead change and to understand how people accept, engage with and maintain successful organisational change. The eight stages or steps include the creation of "a sense of urgency" and the use of "short-term wins".

Short-term wins, within a 6–18 month window, are considered necessary because "[an] organization has to realize some benefits from [a] change effort to maintain stakeholder commitment". Kotter asserts that to be useful or influential, short-term wins need to be "visible and unambiguous" as well as "closely related to the change effort". Arguing against a belief that there is a "trade-off" between wins in the short-term and wins in the long-term, Kotter argues from experience that both are achievable.