Are you planning a big strategic change for your organization? An acquisition? A new service line? Closing a service line? A new payer contract? A reorganization?

Every executive approaches “big changes” with a combination of excitement and trepidation. How best to shepherd those big changes to the successful finish line is the question—and the subject of a new analysis, How To Avoid A False Start When You’re Leading A Big Change.

Organizational change requires executives to lead two back-to-back initiatives. The first is adoption of the change. The second is execution. Most C-suite executives I talk to often refer to failed initiatives as a failure of execution.

But the author’s conclusion, after postmortem analyses of hundreds of failed initiatives, is that failure…