ITLPviii Group Kotter

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ITLPviii Main Page > Group Kotter



Group Kotter


Group Members

What time is it
for everybody?

Session One

Our Paper

What Leaders Really Do by John Kotter
Harvard Business Review, December 2001
HBR_What_Leaders_Really_Do.pdf (704 KB)

The Other Papers

The Work of Leadership by Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie
Harvard Business Review, December 2001
HBR_Work_of_Leadership.pdf (316 KB)

The Leadership Advantage by Warren Bennis
Leader to Leader, No. 12, Spring 1999
http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/spring99/bennis.html

The Leaderful Community by Joseph Raelin
Innovative Leader, Volume 12, Number 6, June 2003
http://www.winstonbrill.com/bril001/html/article_index/articles/551-600/article579_body.html

The Assignment

Develop a brief synopsis of the author’s views on leadership to be presented to the group on Day One. Please contrast the author you are reading with at least one of the other authors’ perspectives on leadership; discuss how your team wants to make your ten minute (or so) presentation. You are encouraged to be innovative in how you share this work with the class. Reading PowerPoint slides does not qualify as innovative: A leader needs to have the ability to capture and hold people's attention while communicating a message. (Full description.)

Comments/Thoughts

Kotter (What Leaders Really Do)

From Jim Loter, UW, 5/3/2007...

I'm keeping my non-editorial notes on the reading here: http://www.engr.washington.edu/confluence/x/FAY

From Erik Lundberg, UW, 5/3/2007...

I've only just started to read the Kotter article (What Leaders Really Do), but the point that crystalized for me is that,

  • "Managers promote stability, and leaders promote change".
  • And secondarily, "One person can do both".

Heifeetz-Laurie (The Work of Leadership)

From Erik Lundberg, UW, 5/7/2007...

My summary of the Heifeetz-Laurie article (The Work of Leadership) is:

"Adaptive Work". Leaders don't solve problems themselves. Instead, they pose the questions that

  • (a) engage others to take on the responsibility to identify the problems, and
  • (b) create an environment that makes it okay to break the rules and do things differently.

From Jim Loter, UW, 5/7/2007

My summary: http://www.engr.washington.edu/confluence/x/JwY

Interesting point to contrast with Kotter: "The prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision and aligning people with that vision is bankrupt because it continues to treat adaptive situations as if they were technical: The authority figure is supposed to diving where the company is going and people are supposed to follow." (13)

Doesn't this sound like a direct challenge to Kotter?

Bennis (The Leadership Advantage)

From Erik Lundberg, UW, 5/7/2007...

My summary of the Bennis article (The Leadership Advantage) is:

  • Key to an organization's success is the "capacity to create the social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital."
  • "Exemplary leaders are distinguished by the master of the soft skills, above all, character."
  • "Exemplary leaders believe they have a responsibility to extend people's growth and to create an environment where people constantly learn."

Raelin (The Leaderful Community)

From Erik Lundberg, UW, 5/7/2007...

These two quotes lifted from the article seem to distill it for me:

  • "Leadership becomes a collective property, not the sole sanctuary fo any one (most important) member."
  • "Leadership of the unit needs to come from within the community, not from an ultimate authority imposed from the outside."

Presentation Ideas

Case Studies

(drawn from our institutions)

Off-shoot topics

From Jim Loter, UW, 5/3/2007

One of my first tasks when reading material that was developed for business is to apply the "higher ed filter." I ask: What about this is relevant or irrelevant to the higher ed sector? What about it needs to be altered to adapt to our business model?

So far, I have two strawman topics for discussion:

(1) What drives change in the higher education sector?

On page 4 of the Kotter article: "Part of the reason [leadership] has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and more volatile. Faster technological change, greater international competition, the deregulation of markets, overcapacity in capital-intensive industries, an unstable oil cartel, raiders with junk bonds, and the changing demographics of the workforce are among the many factors that have contributed to this shift."

Which of those factors are contributing to accelerated change in higher ed, and which are relatively immune to? Are there others that are unique to our sector?

We hear all the time about how "things are different" now, but why, for example, are systems that have processed student enrollments or have issued employee paychecks like clockwork for 30 years suddenly considered antiquated and insufficient? What's driving the (real or perceived) need for change that requires a higher degree of leadership?

Another way to think about this question is to consider how I sometimes respond to people who complain their computer is "too slow": Computers (and applications) don't grow slower over time (provided they are properly maintained); their capacities remain constant. What changes are (a) the demands made upon them (demand for increased functionality), (b) the cost of repairing them (obsolescence), and (c) the need for them to interoperate (changes made in other computing environments).

So, taking them in turn:

(a) What drives the demand for new functionality?

(b) What drives obsolescence?

(c) What drives the need to interoperate (and what changes the ways we interoperate)?

(2) To what extent are we (Universities) hamstrung by financial and organizational models that keep our units (colleges, schools, departments) autonomous and siloed?

If we map our university's (the UW) organization onto a business model, schools and colleges can be see as product lines and central offices are similar to functional departments. Yet, each "product line" typically also maintains its own complete set of functional departments -- HR, finance, admissions, IT, etc. The situation that often arises is that units along the vertical/functional axis of the organization are in competition with one or more units along the horizontal/product axis. Add to that the fact that, in the IT sector, "central" IT units tend to operate as cost-centers, and you have a situation where there is little incentive or opportunity for units to hand hard-won control over to the central IT division by paying them for them privilege.

How can leaders effectively align (or marshal) resources that are not under any one unit's control in order to achieve a more productive and well-managed end?

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