“The organizations that are able to sustain change over time are those that focus on the fundamentals that we know drive successful change: communication, training, leadership engagement and measurement. And despite nearly uniform acceptance that these are the key drivers of change, the companies that aren’t good at them aren’t getting any better.”

nearly nine out of 10 respondents (87%) train their managers to manage change. However, less than one-fourth of all respondents (22%) report their training is effective.

The 2013 Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI Survey was conducted in June 2013. A total of 276 large and midsize organizations from across North America, Europe and Asia participated.

Last year he and a team of colleagues reported the results of a National Science Foundation-backed experiment that combined meditation with multitasking. The subjects were human-resource managers. Some got meditation training, and others did not. They were then asked to complete tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, amid a barrage of interruptions from e-mail, instant messages, phone calls, and knocks on the door.

The results: Those who had received meditation training were less fragmented in their work, switching tasks less frequently and spending more time on each one. They also showed less stress and better memory. The

Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, studies multitasking. When Stanford convened a conference on that subject in 2009, he emphasized that "multitasking is actually rapid task switching, since the human brain does just one thing at a time."