He started his teaching career at Harvard Business School in 1972, becoming a full professor in 1980 at the age of 33. When he opted to retire at 54, he quipped that he became the youngest retired professor—after having been the youngest full professor—in his field.

He is, of course, much more than that, being one of the most sought-after gurus in the fields of leadership and change. His name is inherently linked to the term “change leadership,” and one of his major messages is “Leadership is about change.”

His three most influential books—his “change trilogy”—are A Force for Change (1990), in which he differentiated leadership and management as separate activities and processes; Leading Change (1996), in which he identified eight steps to successfully leading a change initiative; and The Heart of Change (co-authored with Dan Cohen, 2002), in which he introduced the powerful “see-feel-change” model.

His sixteenth book, Our Iceberg Is Melting (co-authored with Holger Rathgeber in 2002), marked a “change” away from his usual academic research work. A fable about how a group of penguins move away from a melting iceberg, the book is consistent with one of his central findings about change, which is that stories are the force for change.

In January 2008, when he was busy writing his next book, A Sense of Urgency (published in September that year), we had a dialog starting with the “penguin book” at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was hearing more and more people say, “People belonging to organizations need to understand this material. But most people, except for recent MBA graduates, don’t read business books. So what can you do for me?”

At that time I was studying neurology, the study of the brain, trying to understand how people learn in the sense of changing their actions, not just holding information in their brains.

It all seemed to converge at one point when Holger Rathgeber, who is German, sent me an email one day. His idea was to try to put together a story because the brain likes stories. The brain is not built for PowerPoint slides. We decided to write a book that took the same material, expanded it in a few directions, and made it relatively simple and easy, and interesting to read. We put it in a form of a fable. That is what led to the new book.

So, it takes the material from Leading Change and The Heart of Change, it adds a little bit more about specific personalities, but offers it up in a very different form, with the idea of affecting the brain in a different way and reaching a broader audience. That was the logic behind it.

It was the best-selling business book in Germany for 50 weeks, and Holland for 40 weeks. It’s been on one of the charts in America for 16 months. So some people have picked it up. From the emails I get, clearly in some circumstances it is doing what we wanted. People read it. They talk about it. It creates a little language system they don’t forget.

Stories remain in the brain, and therefore have some chance of affecting behavior. So it is a different vehicle, a different methodology for helping people with content that I have written about before.

So, increasingly over the years, the questions that keep going through my mind not only relate to what I observe in the sense of performance, particularly on the leadership side, but how to help people do more than read, nod their head, and then forget. How do you get them to actually somehow absorb material and do something with it? That has affected my writing a lot over the last 15 years. This penguin book was just one more little vehicle for trying to do that.

But you could define it more broadly too. You are experiencing a story right now. The story is the meeting you are having with John. That’s the story. You are experiencing it, and the brain is clearly preprogrammed for absorbing that form of “story” because it has been doing this sort of thing for tens of thousands of years. So it is what people call “hardwired” to absorb and retain that form of story.

Another form of story comes through video. I have been using videos in my speeches for years now. They are videos of people and companies and sometimes they stand by themselves as a story and sometimes you have tell an audience what else was happening before or after what they see. This is not a story in the sense of occupying written pages. It’s not a verbal speech: grandfather telling the grand-children a “story.” But it can be a very, very powerful way to grab people’s attention, give them an idea or two, and leave it in the brain so that it might affect their behavior.

So, if you define a story in broad terms, if it is not the most powerful tool to change behavior that can create better performance, it is certainly close. If you define it narrowly, it is yet one more tool, albeit an important one.

I am saying that stories are tools that can be used by anyone and they can come in many forms besides a verbal recital. Stories can be given by somebody like myself, in written form, say in a book. They can also be videotapes that anybody can use. Both are quite independent of a “CEO telling stories.” So, do I think CEOs should tell stories? Sure, if they are good at it, but that’s just one of many ways that stories can be used to increase performance. Let’s not get too carried away with focusing on CEOs talking.

There is an expression in English—I don’t know if it is translated into other languages—“Show them, don’t tell them.” It is very often what great novelists do. They don’t say, “George has these six personality characteristics, period.” They write in a way that demonstrates it. It’s more powerful that way.

Lou Gerstner, for one, is a great example of someone who knows how to show and not just tell. I love the example of his turning off the video projector.¹ That says it all. He created this little story through his actions one day which went out faster, stronger, and clearer than any memo he could ever send out. So yes, I think there are some CEOs who are very good at that—and more could be and should be.

I think, obviously, the more engaging the better: interesting, funny, and dramatic. That helps. If there are characters that people can identify with, that helps. Most stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Structure helps.

I suspect experts on stories know a lot about that. I don’t. I haven’t dug into it. I haven’t analyzed the nature of storytelling.

But if you look at the cases that were written in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, they were different from the cases today. One of the most famous cases from the 1950s was still alive when I joined the faculty in 1972. It was two pages long, with no numbers. It was a story like, “Here’s the situation. Fred does this. This is what happened next. So what should Fred do now?” Those sorts of cases don’t exist anymore. The typical case today is thick, is full of numbers, and is boring.

Here is another way to see the problem. Who is a phenomenal storyteller? Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg will not be impressed by our cases. Even if he was trying to have people in DreamWorks—I don’t know how many people are employed in the firm—even if he wanted them to learn more about management, I can’t see him using our cases because he knows what a good story is and the power it can have.

Cases today are usually still stories. There are just less story-like than they were decades ago, which has to do with the development of analytical tools. And probably to some degree because economists have taken control of business schools.

I was just on the phone with a well-known company that’s been growing, but the entrepreneurial culture that helped make it so successful is beginning to die out, mostly because it has hired so many new people. One of the ways I have seen people deal with this problem is to come up with a good story, sometimes very much rooted in the earliest years of the company, that defines “Who we are.” Then they tell the story in various ways. For new hires, new-employee orientation is an important part. Done well, that strategy can be powerful.

One last thing on stories. I have executives trying to turn companies around come to me on a regular basis. What I have learned over the years is before they give me the company background, its problems, all on PowerPoint slides, I say, “Just tell me, what is the story?” That is my leading line: What is the story. Often it shapes the conversation in a way that makes it a lot easier for me to understand what’s going on, what their problems are, where they are trying to go, and how they had difficulty trying to get there.

It’s also not unusual for people to come to me and say, “Our problem is communicating our vision. We tried this and that. Two levels down, they clearly don’t understand.” I say, “Fine. How are you communicating?” They hand me something, usually a thick pile of paper. I look through it. It is PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide: little dots, short sentences, jargon . . . and I can’t figure out what they are talking about.

I find myself just spontaneously saying, “Have you ever tried wrapping this up as a story, and telling people at your meetings, and giving it to people to share the story with others?” In this case, it is more about the story of “Where we are trying to go.” So, it is your third category. If put in 100 PowerPoint slides, some people will be able to understand because they are very analytical and they have just been through Harvard Business School. But most people haven’t and won’t get it. Even among the people who do get it, I am not sure how well they can retain that information. A good story about this fabulous future you and I are going to create together can stick more.

A company in Dallas has turned this into a one-day training program with my permission. There is a big module that asks you to think about which of the characters in the book you are most like, and which of the characters are most like the others on the team you actually work with daily. It is a very interesting and useful exercise. That is what I mean when I say we have added a little bit more. I suspect there are a few more things in the book that I am not even aware of, or did not arrive at consciously.

So my new book is about urgency, and basically the argument is this: in an increasingly turbulent and fast-moving world, change is becoming more and more important. If you look at where people stumble, it’s right at the beginning. So more people need to know how to create and maintain a moderately high sense of urgency. In this book, I spell out the tactics that people use or don’t use.

It is not enough just to create urgency and go on to the next step; you have to both create and maintain it throughout the process. Even more important, as the world moves faster, organizations have change going on all over the place, all the time. In such a world, it is a huge strategic advantage to have a relatively high state of urgency almost built into the organization’s DNA.

An obvious place where you can help people grow their leadership potential is at yearly top management meetings. I make speeches in those settings all the time. It is amazing how often firms waste this opportunity, or send out messages that have nothing to do with good leadership. They set up a room with seats in a way where you end up with a lot of long, narrow rows that makes it look like a military command-and-control exercise. This is hardly appropriate for people who are as well educated as they are today, in an environment that is moving as fast as it is. We try to talk them into putting the chairs into a half-circle and do lots of subtle little things to encourage a new mindset.

The next step is developing that potential into skills. I have yet to find anybody that has developed all of his or her potential.

And the third step is actually using the skills in what you do each day. In my experience, this is very rarely done. People hold back for many reasons, including not having the courage to stick their necks out, or believing that leadership is the CEO’s job, not theirs.

So the aim of leadership development is twofold. First, it is to develop potential into skills. Second, it is to get people to use those skills as often and as aggressively as possible.

It is also about mobilizing. People often do their thing, and slowly. Yet to make great things happen often takes a group effort, it takes energy, and it takes everybody marching toward a specific, sensible direction. And mobilizing is a good word, at least in English.

I like things short and simple. So, “mobilizing people to make challenging things happen.” There you go.