Our CEO just announced a large-scale transformation project and appointed my team to execute the project. What should we be thinking about to get started and how do we ensure success?

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If you are a CEO, chairman, or transformation leader, launching a company-wide transformation may be one of the highest-stakes decisions of your career. Whether the transformation is triggered by new leadership, shareholder pressure or industry disruption, both success and failure is likely to end up in the spotlight—with potentially career altering impacts. So what can a leadership team do to maximise their chances of success? While every transformation situation and objective is unique, our research and project experience reveal five key imperatives:Go big:It may seem less dangerous to pursue performance improvement in increments, but research shows that large, integrated transformations perform three times better than serial, decentralized ones. In fact, repeated restructuring can damage your organization’s confidence, cohesion, and vitality. So go for a holistic, multiyear program that transforms the entire company.Take fewer, but bigger steps: Success is linked to conceptual scale, and a proliferation of small ideas creates organizational drag. Successful transformers typically make several big bets, rather than hundreds of incremental efforts. Transformation is not about short-term cures, but long-term healing and addressing the fundamentals of how your company operates.Go all in, make it personal and be inclusive: Publicly commit. Announce the program to the market. Eliminate any chance of half-hearted effort. Responsibility cannot be delegated. Your board, CEO, and executive team must all personally commit to applying your full selves to your strategy’s success. Rallying around one goal will help drive a cross-functional end-to-end solutions and break down established silos.Anticipate and embrace disruption: Bringing a clean-sheet mindset, moving beyond incremental thinking, and deliberately shifting the company outside its comfort zone are essential to imagining the art of what is possible and achieving breakthrough resultsReinvest for success. Cost-out-only programs fail. Make winning big your transformation’s goal, and re-invest program returns to fuel market-leading growth—in the right areas! To learn more, please read our article on “The Five Keys to a Successful Transformation."