Time & Perspective Quote by John P. Kotter

Kotter’s line lands like a calm definition, but it’s really a boundary marker in a long-running workplace turf war: leadership versus management. Coming from an educator who built a career advising organizations on change, the sentence is less inspiration than instruction. It tells executives what their job is supposed to be when the org is anxious, complacent, or stuck in a slow drift of meetings and metrics.

The phrasing does two things at once. “Establish the vision” frames the leader as an author of the future, not a caretaker of the present. “Set the strategy” pulls vision out of the realm of posters and keynote slogans and tethers it to a route: choices, trade-offs, sequencing. Kotter’s subtext is a critique of organizations that confuse activity with direction. You can optimize processes all day and still be headed nowhere in particular. Vision is the antidote to busywork; strategy is the antidote to wishful thinking.

Context matters: Kotter rose to prominence as companies faced globalization, tech disruption, and shareholder pressure that made “steady state” feel like a fantasy. His broader project was to legitimize change as a discipline, not a mood. In that world, the leader’s core function becomes sense-making: reducing uncertainty by declaring what matters, what comes first, and what won’t be pursued.

There’s an implied warning, too. If leaders don’t set the strategy, someone else will: a consultant, an algorithm, a competitor, inertia. Kotter isn’t romanticizing authority; he’s making a practical claim about responsibility under volatility.