Here is a simple recipe for leading change. First, pour a truckload of evidence into an ungreased container. Stir in a crock full of inspirational rhetoric. Add two heaping portions of administrative imperatives. Finally, dump into the mix precisely one ton of fear. Bring to a boil.

If this recipe were effective, then change leadership would not be the single greatest challenge for organizations around the world—not only in education, but also in business, government, professional practices, and nonprofit organizations. Deutschman (2007) demonstrates that the typical combination of evidence, authority, and fear is insufficient to lead the vast majority of people to make decisions that will save their own lives, gain years with their loved ones, and avoid painful and debilitating illness and eventual death. The fear of pain and death is not, for many people, greater than their unwillingness to change. In the business world, the results of failed change efforts have "been appalling, with wasted resources and burned-out, scared, or frustrated employees" (Kotter, 2006, p. 4). Despite the potential cataclysmic effects of global warming, the current wave of environmentalism is best represented by rock stars addressing conferences on climate change, transported to the affair by private jet and a Hummer limousine. It is little wonder that change in educational systems is elusive. Vander Ark (Wagner, Kegan, Lahey, & Lemons, 2006) summarized the challenges well when he noted, "This work is hard—it's complicated, technical, personal, and political" (p. xi).

In my attempts to advise almost 200,000 readers of Educational Leadership every month about leading change, I have had the unexpected pleasure of an e-mail inbox overflowing with helpful ripostes, a sample of which include the following:

• "I've always been a collaborative leader, and I know that we have to get buy-in from all the stakeholders before we can start a successful change effort. Therefore, until you can explain to me how to get buy-in from everyone, I'm afraid that change will have to wait."
• "Of course I want to change—it's just that everyone else is resisting it."
• "I believe you, Doug—really. It's just that no one else in my school does. So I'm afraid that change is quite impossible right now."

These correspondents are my colleagues, my friends, my readers. Writers like me wouldn't be worth much without them. On the other hand, writers like me aren't worth much more than another gust of hot air unless our readers actually do something. Unless words are transformed into action, then we are the proverbial clanging gong, generating lots of noise but little meaning. The result of paralysis in the face of change is toxic and counterproductive. As Schmoker (2006) concludes, "our typical attempts to reform our schools not only fail but will have a corrupting effect as we engage in the pretense of instructional improvement" (p. 30).

The overwhelming challenges of change inevitably lead to cynicism. When employees are treated as the detritus of change efforts rather than the keys to effective change implementation, then organizations cannot be surprised that firms such as Despair, Inc. thrive. Despair markets what it calls "demotivators," such as a poster with a picture of a salmon leaping into the mouth of a hungry bear, along with the caption "The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly." The poster with the title "Change" has a vivid picture of a tornado and the caption "When the winds of change blow hard enough, the most trivial of things can turn into deadly projectiles." My favorite is the one titled "Despair," with the caption "It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."

It doesn't have to be this way. Fullan (2008) tells us encouragingly that we can create FOEs—Firms of Endearment—by engaging our colleagues rather than manipulating them. In more than two-and-ahalf million miles of travel to schools in every part of the world, I have found a growing number of change leaders. These are the people who not only implement change successfully, but also appear to thrive on it. Their colleagues are no more insightful, desperate, or well informed than average. Their circumstances are neither more dire nor more comfortable, so change is executed neither at the edge of a sword nor in the security of a riskless environment. Rather, these change leaders share a common commitment to the notion that ideas are more important than personalities. They challenge the popular leadership literature that elevates charisma over character, machismo over modesty.

The change leaders described in this book are veterans and novices, women and men; they represent a broad spectrum of cultures and backgrounds. They are introverts and extroverts, teachers and administrators, exceptional and ordinary. You will not find "Leadership by Attila the Hun" in the following pages any more than you will find the elusive attributes of saints. You will find, I hope, people like you, sharing similar challenges but perhaps with different results. Their stories are completely authentic. Unlike what frequently passes for "research" that is veiled in anonymity and rarely, if ever, verifiable, you will read about real people and real schools, with names and locations clearly identified.

We begin with a consideration of the conditions for change. Educational leaders are expert in announcing change, scattering the seeds of promising ideas. But they are considerably less adept at moving aside the initiatives of the previous year so that the seeds of the new announcement have the slightest opportunity to take root. Hence the injunction that we must "pull the weeds" before we "plant new flowers." You will also find Change Readiness Assessments for individuals and organizations, tools that could be useful to complete before you embark on the next change initiative. Culture is deeply ingrained in educational institutions, and so we closely examine what it takes to change school culture. The first part of the book closes with a consideration of myths related to change and leadership.

The second part of the book considers planning for change, which involves a combination of people and process, with the former beating the latter by a good distance. It isn't that strategic planning, as it is frequently practiced, is worthless. It can actually be much worse than that, with counterproductive results that are sustained far longer than the changes the strategists purported to plan. Fortunately, there are effective planning models that replace piles of three-ring binders with highly focused goals and action plans. Individual and small-group actions, which formulate the essence of successful change, can be nurtured and sustained with effective coaching. However, just as "strategic planning" has frequently been anything but strategic, so also "coaching" represents a range of meanings, from pseudotherapy to a catalyst for performance that transforms individuals and organizations.

Third, we consider the essentials of change implementation, using real examples of elementary and secondary schools that have moved change initiatives from rhetoric to reality. Although many change initiatives focus on the basics of literacy and math, the evidence from this part of the book reminds us that successful schools, including those with enormous demographic challenges, see the arts not as a frill but as an integral part of the intellectual and academic development of their students. We also confront the significant difference between what change leaders say and what they do. This chasm is the result not of malice or ineptitude, but rather of a lack of descriptive rigor. When, for example, we hear terms such as "instructional leadership," the difference between vapid slogans and meaningful implementation comes down to the details of daily conversations and decisions by leaders in classrooms and schools.

In the fourth part of the book we consider the issue of sustaining change. Hargreaves and Fink (2006) remind us that international lessons, from Scandinavia to Zambia, shed some light on the essential nature that culture plays in sustaining meaningful change. Sustainability has less to do with five-year plans redolent of Stalin and more to do with the perspective that those responsible for change have outside of themselves. Here we find the missing ingredient in the recipe. Evidence is, of course, important. Administrative clarity is essential. Fear can be not only a natural human reaction to the evidence but also a powerful and even an appropriate element of the change equation. But if we have learned anything over the past several decades of research in change leadership, it is that evidence, commands, and fears are insufficient to create change at either the individual or the organizational level. Sustainable change requires a reorientation of priorities and values so that the comfort and convenience of the individual is no longer the measure by which the legitimacy of change is considered. Rather, we respond to a vision of change that is so compelling and whose benefits for others are so overwhelming that we see students and colleagues not as cogs in the machine but as stars in a galaxy that outshines our fears and dwarfs our apprehensions. At the same time—and this is the key to change leadership—we know that each star in the firmament holds an essential place, and without it, a constellation would be diminished. Thus the paradox of change leadership is the elevation of a vision far greater than the individual and, at the same time, the elevation of the individual to a place that is unique, powerful, and essential. You are about to meet leaders who have done precisely that.

If you would like to continue the dialogue and share your own stories of successful change leadership, log on to www.Change Leaders.info, a noncommercial Web site devoted exclusively to sharing research, case studies, and ideas about successful change leadership.