John Kotter opens Leading Change by presenting his extensive research finding on organizational change initiatives: the substantial majority of large-scale organizational change efforts fail to achieve their intended goals, and this failure pattern stems from identifiable, common mistakes rather than being an inevitable, unavoidable feature of organizational change itself.

Kotter's foundational research finding:

• Drawing on his extensive study of corporate transformation efforts across numerous organizations, Kotter found that a large majority of significant change initiatives failed to achieve their intended objectives, with this failure showing consistent, identifiable patterns rather than appearing genuinely random or organization-specific
• He argues that these common failure patterns are avoidable, meaning organizational change failure isn't an inevitable feature of change itself, but rather a consequence of common, identifiable mistakes in how change efforts are actually led and sequenced
• This foundational research finding sets up the book's overall project: presenting an eight-stage framework, derived from this research, intended to help organizations avoid these common failure patterns and successfully lead large-scale change

This foundational framing establishes Kotter's overall approach: not merely theoretical change management principles, but a specific, sequential, research-derived framework addressing the actual common failure points his extensive corporate research identified.