Lub-Dub Change can be business CPR, but you have to do it right.

In The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of HowPeople Change Their Organizations (Harvard Business SchoolPress), John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen build on the eight-stepchange process from Kotter's 1996 Leading Change(Harvard Business School Press). The book relies on hundreds ofinterviews of senior managers at companies undergoing major change.Cohen's employer, Deloitte Consulting; did the interviewing.Kotter analyzed the results. His key finding: People change whentheir feelings change, not when their thoughts change.

If you're leading a companythrough change, say the authors, make employees feel differently byappealing to their emotions rather than making them thinkdifferently by appealing to their rational side. In practice, thatmeans using stories, pictures, roleplaying and personal contactrather than spreadsheets, mission statements and other analytical,rational tools. For instance, one company tells how it got itsemployees energized to focus on customers by playing a videotape ofan important customer complaining about problems with its products.Other ideas are equally specific and easy to use, in companies ofany size.

Chaos Reigns