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It is crucial to manage change in order to ensure that the changes you bring about are incorporated into the organization. This means that you must help people make the transition to the new standards and processes.
Here are my top choice books on change management for leaders.
This list (and many more) can be found on Amazon.
This article:
1. John P. Kotter, Leading Change
2. Making Sense of Change Management by Esther Cameron & Mike Green
3. John P. Kotter: Our Iceberg is Melting
4. Communication of Change by Elizabeth Harrin
5. Richard Smith and his colleagues have edited The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook.
6. John Hayes, The Theory and Practice of Change Management
7. Kerry Patterson et. al.
8. Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
9. The Catalyst of Jonah Berger
10. Leadership Transformation by Nathan Furr and Kyle Nel
Your reading list

1. John P. Kotter, Leading Change
John P. Kotter, a world-renowned authority on change management, is the author to start with. The comprehensive guide to Leading Change (2012) outlines his 8-step process of managing change.
Kotter’s method isn’t the only one for managing organizational change. However, it’s a well-known model that can be used to help you understand the process and decide what to apply to your projects.
Kotter’s 8-step process for changing is:
Instill a sense of urgency
As the change team, form a guiding alliance
Make a vision for the future
Communicate your vision
Encourage people to take action by removing obstacles
Give yourself the chance to win quick, short-term.
Continue to build on the incremental changes
It should be a long-lasting commitment.
This is a very high-level overview. The book goes into much more detail.
2. Making Sense of Change Management by Esther Cameron & Mike Green
The fifth edition of Making Sense Of Change Management: A Comprehensive Guide to the Models and Tools of Organizational Change Management is now available.
It’s a bestseller and is billed as the definitive guide to change management. Learn the theories and models of change management and how to apply them in your workplace.
This course is for people who are involved in change management and leadership roles. It will help you adapt your organization to change.
This book is more about organizational transformation and disruptive change than project-driven’small’ changes. However, the case studies and theories can be applied to project environments.
3. John P. Kotter: Our Iceberg is Melting
Kotter’s Another Book, Our Iceberg is Melting, Changing and Suffering Under Any Conditions is a quick read that explains why the ‘burning platforms’ are so important for helping businesses find new ways to do things.
This book was a delight to me when I read it. It’s a business tale (which isn’t something I like to read), but it’s entertaining and gets the point across. It’s about a group penguins who live on an iceberg, and how they come to terms what their next steps should look like. It will make you smile as you read it.
The book’s purpose is to highlight archetypes, which are the types of colleagues that you will most likely work with (or who will block the change) during the project. You can develop a plan for change that meets everyone’s needs while bringing people together around the vision if you understand their motivations.
A ‘burning platform’ refers to a place where the change is so extreme that you must jump from the burning platform into a sea to move forward (and to survive). One of these was used on my biggest project and it was a great way to explain why we were doing what we were doing.