We studied 6,000 executives and found the real reason 70% of transformations fail
Corporate transformations have a failure rate of around 70%, a statistic that has remained unchanged for decades. The primary reason for these failures is not resistance from employees, but rather a misunderstanding by leaders of how people change. To improve success rates, leaders must focus on the experiences and needs of employees during the transformation process.
- ▪The failure rate of corporate transformations is approximately 70%.
- ▪Leaders often misjudge how employees feel and behave during change initiatives.
- ▪Successful transformations require leaders to treat employees as customers and prioritize their experiences.
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| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/why-corporate-transformations-fail-behavioral-science-bcg-julia-dhar/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T10:09:57.447Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T10:09:57.447Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jLQB-Yw45t3O |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Corporate transformations fail much more often than they succeed. The failure rate is around 70% and this figure has not improved in decades. Since the 1980s, human beings digitized the global economy, mapped the human genome, and built cars that can drive themselves. But over the same period, we did not become meaningfully better at helping groups of people do things differently.Recommended Video We all suffer the consequences. Shareholders lose capital. Customers are stuck with services that could be better and cheaper. And employees bear a heavy cost of wasted time, energy, and belief. Every failed change program leaves scar tissue in an organization, reducing its appetite and capacity for future adaptation.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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