Book Review John Kotter Our Iceberg Is Melting Essay Example

BUS ADM 733 – Organization Development Book Review: Our Iceberg is Melting Our Iceberg Is Melting is a rather unique and most certainly entertaining fable by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber. While the authors’ key intention was to portray an array of turbulent changes in the context of Eight-Step Change Model, the book also applies a multitude of other business theories to the concept of organizational change. As it has been mentioned in the paragraph above, the main constituent of change is quite obvious: the penguin society is a subject to Kotter’s Eight-Step Change Process. In my opinion, the book provides its readers with an excellent description of each stage. Similarly to many human societies, the penguins enjoyed a traditional organizational structure; they had always lived on the same iceberg and change was deemed unnecessary. Nevertheless, there was an observant and curious penguin named Fred who saw an urgent need for change. Fred was not the first penguin to realize a threat posed to their society, yet he was clearly the first one to have enough creativity and strength to stand against the “this is the way that we’ve always done it” attitude. Feeling a lack of formal authority and power within an organization, Fred recognized a need to build a coalition with Alice – the most flexible and open-minded member of the Leadership Council. By contrast, most other member of the Council seemed to demonstrate typical features of executives: short span of attention, lack of time, threat-rigidity and group mentality. Through the use of simple model of iceberg and general assembly, Fred and Alice were able to complete the first step – they created a sense of urgency affecting Louis, the Head Penguin, and some others. Needless to say, strong resistance to change, which usually accompanies the early stages, emerged in the face of NoNo. In the second step, Alice and Fred pulled together a guiding team consisting of the most dedicated participants: Buddy,