In my profession, I give a lot of speeches on change management tools and techniques, as well as longer roll-up-your-sleeves presentations/workshops. Over the years, it occurred to me that there were three things that distinguished presentations that truly stand out. I am talking about presentations in which you expect people to take something useful away. You hired a speaker because you believed he or she would offer something important to your organization.

When people are forced to attend a session or you bring in a speaker just to fill a slot in the agenda, you risk wasting people’s time and your money.If you expect people to learn something, then they need to come to the meeting with high expectations. They need to be hungry to hear what’s being said. When that occurs, people are engaged, they ask probing and challenging questions, and they start connecting what the speaker is saying to what they need to learn. And if the speaker fails to deliver, they will challenge him or her.

Geena Davis said,  “. . . when ‘Thelma and Louise’ came out the reaction was so overwhelming that it made me realize how few opportunities we have for women to feel like that coming out of a movie.” So, she created the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media to address this problem.

“I go to meetings at the guilds and networks and studios and production companies and present the research in a private and collegial way. And the reaction is fantastic, because they’re shocked and horrified, and they want to make a change.”

As I write this, I am attending a webinar on how to conduct effective webinars! (Really, I am not making this up!). You can see that I am multi-tasking, which means that I am barely paying attention to the speaker. Hmmm.

Someone wrote to me last week and asked, “How can I track energy during webinars that I conduct?” (In The Energy Bar video, I say that you must be able to read how well your meeting is going – is energy increasing or decreasing?)

With all the books, consultants, and decades of experience leading major organizational changes, I keep expecting the success rate of these major projects to rise, but the failure rate still remains high.

Back in 1995, when I first started writing about change in organizations, the failure rate was about 70 percent. In 2008, IBM conducted a major international study of C-level executives and found that only about 40 percent of those changes succeeded. In 2013, a Towers Watson study found a long-term success rate of 25 percent.

There is a good reason why people don't tell you the truth. (Wait for it.) They aren't idiots.

A senior manager in a small privately-owned company told me they would warn new hires to never criticize the owner’s ideas in a meeting. But, some enthusiastic newbies didn’t listen. They wanted to make their mark, show their worth, and that was pretty much the last anyone ever saw of them.