A couple of Sunday morning metaphors, one illuminates why change is hard. The second is Lessons from a CIA Manager #23: Sentiment and Leadership are like mixing Water and Flour in a Dough.
I actually just posted some quick words over at RebelsatWork.com on why rebels need to stop advertising themselves as destroyers of the status quo. By making that your focus, you risk confusing the means with the ends. But you can read more about that here.
In that piece I used some garden metaphors to describe the more subtle relationship between forward change and the status quo. And I was reminded of what people say about home remodeling. Builders always say it is easier and cheaper to build a new home from scratch than it is to remodel extensively an existing structure. And they’re right. Making structural changes while retaining that which is good or necessary of what already exists has got to be just about the hardest of organizational activities. But sometimes that’s the only path that’s available to you as a rebel.
- To build a new business from scratch you have to stop doing the work and providing the services that presumably people still need. A non-starter.
- To gain enough backing to start making at least some of the necessary changes, you have to take into consideration the views of those who love the organization and its culture in a Billy Joel kind of way or Bruno Mars. Unless you can figure out how to fire them all, or transport them to a parallel universe, you have to make change happen with the talent you already have.
Second Metaphor. Sentiment and Leadership are like mixing Water and Flour in a Dough. Here I was inspired by a tweet this morning in the regular Sunday morning tweetchat #spiritchat .
Too much compassion w/o healthy detachment from another’s processes leads to compassion fatigue #spiritchat
RecoveringFed 
I suppose that former wanabe CIA agent trainee who was sending tweets and got reported in the news last week was probably not going about being a rebel in the correct manner.
Interesting post. I have seen a lot of compassionless management and a lot of its companion, people in leadership positions who have no compassion. Truly good leaders must have compassion, which might be looked at as having values that go beyond solely the value of getting the mission done. For example, if a leader feels compelled to act against the interests of someone–close friend or otherwise–the leader should have the compassion (also known as courage in this case) to inform the individual regarding the leader’s role in the decision and reasons for taking the action. This makes particularly good sense when a friend is involved, because in most organizations, the friend is likely to find out who made the decision and have that lingering question of “why” hover like a cloud over the relationship, assuming the relationship survives.