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The False Alignment Trap

Cheuk Lun Alan Lo & Vanessa Lyu

Summary.   

Most organizational change efforts fail not because of poor execution but because senior leaders fall into a false alignment trap—believing they agree on why, what, and how to

Decades of experience and research have consistently shown that most organizational change efforts fail. In 1993 Michael Hammer, who launched the business-process-reengineering movement, somberly concluded in his book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution that “as many as 50% to 70% of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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