Penguins are definitely in fashion. Harvard B School prof and organizational change expert John Kotter certainly hasn’t missed the trend. With Holger Rathgeber, Kotter has penned a delightful, simple and informative change management fable based in an Antarctic penguin colony.

In Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions, the penguins discover their iceberg home is melting and need to do some serious flock-wide work to address the problem they face. As the fable unfolds in this short little book with illustrations that can’t help but make you smile, Kotter and Rathgeber bring to life key concepts for managing change in any system…work, home, community.

Read it once through for the fun of the story and the dry penguin wit. You can do it in less than an evening. Then read it again for the change management lessons. Then keep it on your bookshelf for reference, or even better, invite your management team to read and discuss it. Back in my college dean days, it’s the kind of book I’d have asked staff to read before we headed out for our annual retreat picnic.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.