CEOs and other leaders, in the corporate world and beyond, should do more than follow the news on the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare).

You should ask what would you do if in President Obama’a shoes. After all, several generic parts of this drama add up to one of the most difficult and frustrating challenges that you as a leader can confront.

Indeed, abstracting from the specifics of the ACA, think of the case set up as follows:

A committed and visionary CEO pursues a strategic initiative that she/he believes is timely, important, urgent and durable;
Significant multi-year efforts are devoted to designing a comprehensive strategy, and to persuade others of its merit and beneficial impact;
Protracted and inevitably-tense negotiations lead to modifications and compromises; and
The end result doesn’t totally correspond to the initial ambition, but it still captures most of the key strategic elements and the visionary essence.

With all this behind the CEO, the time now comes for the much-anticipated roll out. But rather than go smoothly, the execution is – unexpectedly – a debacle…