Why Transformation Efforts Fail

J.P. Kotter's article "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" is an eye-opening series of revelations about the mistakes that leaders make and the ineffectiveness of the predominant approaches to organizational change. The disturbing stories of error in the KAL flight 007 incident and the Helen DeMarco situation illustrate the points that the author makes about the "curse of cluelessness" and the inability of many managers to see the truth (Kotter). Not every error ends in tragedy, but some do. Furthermore, even the ones that do not end in tragedy at the very least result in corporate misconduct or inefficiency.

Kotter's study points up the fact that today's corporate environment is full of ambiguity and complexity and that most people do not know how to handle either. As with the beleaguered Enron executives, many leaders seem to be clueless about what is going on in their companies or how to handle what they find. They suffer from a lack of the imagination that would allow them to see alternate ways of handling a problem. Helen DeMarco found that her boss had conceived an idea that was sure to fail, but she and her colleagues were afraid to tell him the truth about it. DeMarco felt that deceiving her boss was her only alternative, yet this was not really the case. In the KAL flight 007 incident, one error is compounded on another until a completely preventable tragedy occurs, simply because no one stopped the chain of human errors (Kotter).

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