Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
— George Bernard Shaw
Playwright and Essayist
When I wrote Beyond the Wall of Resistance in 1995 about 70 percent of all major changes in organizations failed. According to recent studies the failure rate is still around 70 percent.1)
Those are sobering statistics.
Since the early ’90s there has been a veritable flood of articles and books on how to lead and manage change. I just did an Amazon search on “change management” and came up with 1,318 hits. Over the past fifteen years, most of the large consulting firms created change management prac- tices. Boutique firms were created just to address the challenges of change.
And it is hard to imagine a manager in any organization who has not taken part in some change management training or been given a copy of one of the books on leading change.
That’s a lot of information. You’d think we’d be pretty good at making
change work by now, but we’re not.
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