In 1972, the same year he completed his doctorate, Kotter joined the Harvard Business School faculty. He received tenure and a full professorship in 1981. He was later named the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership. Kotter retired as a full-time faculty member from Harvard in 2001. In 2008, he co-founded Kotter International with two others, where he currently serves as Chairman. The business consultancy firm applies Kotter's research on leadership, strategy execution, transformation, and any form of large-scale change. Since early in his career, Kotter has received numerous awards for his thought leadership in his field from Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Thinkers50, Global Gurus and others.
Written Work
Kotter is the author of 20 books, 12 of which have been business bestsellers and two of which are overall New York Times bestsellers.
In 2006, Kotter co-wrote Our Iceberg is Melting with Holger Rathgeber where those same 8 steps were expanded into an allegory about penguins. In the book, a group of penguins whose iceberg is melting must change in order to survive while their iceberg home melts. In 2018, Kotter and Rathgeber published a re-written 10th anniversary edition of this international best seller.
''Accelerate''
More recently, Kotter released Buy In , A Sense of Urgency and Accelerate. His educational articles in the Harvard Business Review magazine continue to be among the magazine's top sellers. His Harvard Business Review article "Accelerate!", where he outlines a new type of business structure, won the 2012 McKinsey Award, recognizing it as the most significant article published in the magazine that year.
''Managing Your Boss''
In the book Managing Your Boss, published on January 8, 2008, John Gabarro and Dr. John Kotter speak to the benefits of managing your boss–clarifying your own and your supervisor’s strengths, weaknesses, goals, work styles, and needs.
''The Heart of Change''
Kotter and Dan S. Cohen interviewed and researched over 100 organizations in the midst of large-scale change for The Heart of Change: Real-life Stories of how People Change Their Organizations, published in 2002. With chapters organized by each of the eight stages of change, there is a focus on connecting with people’s emotions and what will spark the behavior change and actions that lead to success.
