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John Kotter wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review reporting that 70% of change efforts fall short of the objectives they were designed to achieve.

What explains this sorry state of affairs? Lots of factors make or break change efforts:

• Support from senior leaders
• Commitment and engagement of key stakeholders
• Allocation of needed resources
• And many, many more

Read on to learn about adding another Critical Success Factor to put in place for your change work to work to the list of seven I have described in another article.

I got an email last week from my wife. It was one of those notes that’s been forwarded across cyberspace until it finds its way into your inbox. The story was about some guy who played his violin for 45 minutes in a DC train station at rush hour. 1,097 people passed by while he was playing. Only a half dozen stopped and listened. He collected $32.17 in tips. Scenes like this play out every day in train stations around the world.

But this day was different. So was the guy playing the music.

Several years ago Dick and Emily Axelrod, Julie Beedon and I co-authored You Don't Have to Do It Alone: How To Involve Others to Get Things Done.

One of the chapters in the book was about how to turn the time-wasting, energy-draining and spirit-sapping experiences called meetings into engaging and productive gatherings.

Rick has been a friend and colleague of mine for a number of years. He's a noted expert in the field of change and in particular has a different take on resistance. What's different? Rick encourages clients to use resistance as a way to build support for your change work by seeking out, listening to, and partnering with those resisting what you are trying to accomplish. This is the same approach I recommended in my article on strategies to use when you don't have senior leadership support for your change work. NBC Nightly News, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fortune have all sought Rick's counsel on how to, as he says it, Change Without Migraines.

I recently did an interview with Michael Fischer from Lyondell-Basell about important change work to do during this economic downturn. The short list of to do’s is pretty straightforward:

Manage costs. Decrease them wherever possible

Protect your share of a shrinking marketplace

Conserve cash so that you can weather the financial storm

These make sense. But alone, they miss the mark.

There’s one good thing about times like these when the economy tanks. It encourages out of the box thinking. You get ahead by challenging fundamental assumptions. The more sacred the assumption, the more you need to call it into question.

What’s the most basic assumption in this economy?

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