The heart not by-passed.

Most of us would like to consider ourselves to be "reasonable" people. This is especially true when it comes to our jobs. Yes, we may say that we're "passionate" about what we do. But at the proverbial end of the day, we probably think that it is necessary to apply a greater degree of our brains to our jobs and a lesser amount of heart. Yet John P. Kotter of the Harvard Business School (and his writing partner Dan S. Cohen of Deloitte Consulting) makes a persuasive case in The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations (Harvard Business School Press; 224 pp.; $20.00) that the nature of people is to be more feeling than is commonly given credit for, and that leaders ought to take that into account when trying to make things happen in an organization.

Let's face it: If most of us were told that we have been made redundant by a downsizing initiative, we'd feel a kick in our gut long before we'd start doing the math on what we have in the bank and how long it will last. One of the points of this text is to provide ideas about the ways and means to create change so as to avoid things like downsizing and consequent redundancy.

As it states right on page one: "People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings." The validity of that statement is based on an analysis of two sets of interviews conducted during the past seven years among 400 people from 130 organizations. But because they maintain that the best approach is what they call "See-Feel-Change" rather than "Analysis-Think-Change," they provide a series of stories that substantiate the eight-steps that are identified as being important. One of the stories tells of a procurement manager who was convinced that a whole lot of money was being wasted in purchasing. Rather than simply creating reams of documentation, the procurement manager had all of the gloves that the company in question was buying for use in its factories collected and the pricing for each tabulated. As it turned out, there were 424 different kinds of gloves, which ranged in price from $3.22 to $17. A meeting of all the divisional presidents was held. The boardroom table was stacked with gloves that were sorted by use and tagged with price. And the point about purchasing was made far better than would have been the pure analytical approach. (Think of what your company buys--be it fasteners or fabric--that is needlessly different.)

A vital message in this book is that steps can be taken toward improving conditions by people who are not necessarily at the top of the organization, by people who understand the importance of giving life to their demonstrations to their colleagues about why things cannot remain locked into an already obsolete status quo.