Big projects fail at an astonishing rate--more than half the time, by some estimates. It's not hard to understand why. Complicated long-term projects are customarily developed by a series of teams working along parallel tracks. If managers fail to anticipate everything that might fall through the cracks, those tracks will not converge successfully at the end to reach the goal. Take a companywide CRM project. Traditionally, one team might analyze customers, another select the software, a third develop training programs, and so forth. When the project is finally complete, though, it may turn out that the salespeople won't enter in the requisite data because they don't understand why they need to. There is a way to uncover unanticipated problems while the project is still in development. The key is to inject into the overall plan a series of miniprojects, or "rapid-results initiatives," that each have as their goal a miniature version of the overall goal. In the CRM project, a single team might be charged with increasing the revenues of one sales group in one region by 25% within four months. To reach that goal, team members would have to draw on the work of all the parallel teams. But in just four months, they would discover the salespeople's resistance and probably other unforeseen issues, such as, perhaps, the need to divvy up commissions for joint-selling efforts. The World Bank has used rapid-results initiatives to great effect to keep a sweeping 16-year project on track and deliver visible results years ahead of schedule.

Although the integration of an acquired company with the parent organization is a delicate and complicated process, traditionally no one has ever been responsible for that process--for charting how the two companies will combine their operations, for seeing to it that the integration project meets its deadlines and performance targets, and for educating the new people about the parent company and vice versa. Some enlightened companies have recognized this gap and have appointed a guide--the integration manager--to shepherd everyone through the rocky territory that two organizations must cross before they can function effectively together. The authors have interviewed a number of these leaders in depth, as well as some of the people with whom they've worked. They've determined that integration managers help the merger process in four principal ways: they speed it up, create a structure for it, forge social connections between the two organizations, and help engineer short-term successes. In this article, the authors detail five acquisitions--at TI, General Cable, Meritor Automotive, Lucent, and Johnson & Johnson--and discuss the role that integration managers played in each.

Thousands of companies every year acquire other companies, or are acquired themselves. This event is usually painful and messy--and statistics show, it is frequently unsuccessful as well. Nearly half of all mergers fail. One company that has made a fine art of the acquisition integration process, however, is GE Capital, which has integrated hundreds of companies in the past decade. Consultants Ron Ashkenas and Suzanne Francis, and Lawrence DeMonaco of GE Capital, offer four lessons from the company's successful run.

Almost all managers escape some job-induced anxieties by retreating into time consuming activities that entail fewer threats than more challenging executive activities. Much of executives' job anxiety is produced by three tasks: streamlining daily routines, meeting demands to improve performance, and getting subordinates to achieve better results.