Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance and other books on leadership and change, developed the Energy Bar™ as a free tool to help people in organizations get their ideas across in ways that get people committed and engaged. 
Rick has advised leaders from many countries on ways to apply this new tool successfully.
When we think about tough challenges company leaders are likely to face, we might think of slumping sales, falling stock prices, high turnover, or a public relations crisis. All of these issues can be detrimental to a company. I’ve been wanting to dig deeper to learn what else is keeping today’s leaders up at night. So, recently I gathered a group and planted a scenario to uncover what they were facing today.
Here’s the scenario.
What do you do when you’re the leader of a company and a major capital investment isn’t turning out as planned?
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.
Have you ever participated in a meeting and there were no introductions?
What about those meetings where there is a back row of participants who sit quietly throughout and it never quite becomes clear why they are there?
My good friend, Jo, has driven Volkswagens for as long as I can remember. She is considering buying a new car. Although she loves the last VW she purchased, she won’t even consider one of their cars this time.
By way of background this article shares how recently the Environmental Protection Agency found that VW cars being sold in America had software in diesel engines that could detect emissions testing, changing the performance accordingly to improve results. Volkswagen initially denied the claim.
