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.

You may know this story: researchers asked groups to count how often a team passed the ball to other members of their own basketball team.

Pretty simple.

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.

Do you have a presentation coming up? Google just made it easier to engage with your audience.

Too many presentations are dry one-way affairs, with obligatory Q&A at the end of the drone fest. Here is a very simple way to turn a dry presentation into a conversation. Google Slides now allows people in the audience to ask questions using their handheld devices. The speaker receives these questions in real-time.

Would it surprise you to learn that most people don’t quit their jobs because they found a higher paying job? 

While many managers believe people primarily leave for more money, it is actually not the case. Money can be part of the reason, but it is rarely the primary factor.