Make Change Work: Staying Nimble, Relevant, and Engaged in a World of Constant Change

PREFACE

The difference between winning and losing is how the men and women of our company view change as it comes at them.

—Jack Welch Former chief executive officer, General Electric

Another book about change? Really? The thousands of other books on the subject aren’t enough?

I’m with you.

My iceberg has moved. My cheese has melted, and I don’t need to hear another message that changes are coming and I need to get on board.

And yet we are confronted with this reality: Most of our efforts to make change work don’t work as well as we had hoped . . . or even at all.

Need proof?

Research published by John Kotter1 in 1995 stated that 70 percent of change efforts fail to achieve their desired goal. Since that time, there has been an explosion in books, articles, training videos, seminars, and speeches about change.

So what impact did we achieve from all of our focus on change?

In 2013, 18 years after Kotter’s study, every indication is that the vast majority of change efforts—as high as 70 percent by some reports—fail to achieve their desired goal.

That’s right. There has been basically a whopping 0 percent improvement in our collective ability to effectively initiate and implement change.

We can now conclude that all of our attention and focus on change hasn’t really changed our ability to successfully implement change in organizations.

But you knew that already. Think of all the changes you have experienced within the organizations for which you have worked. Don’t you think we would ...