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The False Alignment Trap

Cheuk Lun Alan Lo & Vanessa Lyu

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 forthcoming July–August 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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