No one likes a change agent. No one.
They don't like change agents because they represent an affront to the status quo that legacy employees helped create and maintain. It's very simple for people in a mediocre enterprise to hallucinate that they are achieving above and beyond, even when empiric evidence -- like cratering attendance and football records -- are blindingly obvious to everyone. The legacy employees and other stakeholders committed to the prior means and methods will die on the hill to preserve the status quo.
The legacies don't like change agents because they force people out of their comfort zones. 25 year olds don't like it, 45 year olds hate that. And it's been my experience that they will resist, often overtly, always passively. They struggle to keep things the same, particularly among those who had success at the outset then faced less and less success as the years wear on.
Sometimes the rot is too deep and overwhelms the change agent. I've presided over four departmental rebuilds. I don't regret anything about three of the four, and those three have all succeeded wildly after I departed with my handpicked #2 in place.
One I deeply regret. I reported to the deputy CEO who told me "if I were you, I'd fire all of them." Which I didn't have a problem with per se, but then she added restrictions to the hiring pool which made it impossible as an alternative. So I kept the reclamation projects on as I built the program. We ended up the fastest growing firm of the 100 firms in our cohort. As soon as I left, their annual growth cut in half, then the next year cut in half again. This past year, their growth was 1/12th of my average growth in the four years that I was there. The same mediocrity who was there when I arrived is still there -- only now he's in charge.
And so it goes. Will Andrew Luck deliver a better result than the last four years? Hard to say. But I know it would be difficult to be worse. His Stanford teams were extraordinary, so he has a knowledge base, and my guess is that he has a vision. I didn't ever get the sense that Muir had a vision other than worse/cheaper/fewer sports.
They don't like change agents because they represent an affront to the status quo that legacy employees helped create and maintain. It's very simple for people in a mediocre enterprise to hallucinate that they are achieving above and beyond, even when empiric evidence -- like cratering attendance and football records -- are blindingly obvious to everyone. The legacy employees and other stakeholders committed to the prior means and methods will die on the hill to preserve the status quo.
The legacies don't like change agents because they force people out of their comfort zones. 25 year olds don't like it, 45 year olds hate that. And it's been my experience that they will resist, often overtly, always passively. They struggle to keep things the same, particularly among those who had success at the outset then faced less and less success as the years wear on.
Sometimes the rot is too deep and overwhelms the change agent. I've presided over four departmental rebuilds. I don't regret anything about three of the four, and those three have all succeeded wildly after I departed with my handpicked #2 in place.
One I deeply regret. I reported to the deputy CEO who told me "if I were you, I'd fire all of them." Which I didn't have a problem with per se, but then she added restrictions to the hiring pool which made it impossible as an alternative. So I kept the reclamation projects on as I built the program. We ended up the fastest growing firm of the 100 firms in our cohort. As soon as I left, their annual growth cut in half, then the next year cut in half again. This past year, their growth was 1/12th of my average growth in the four years that I was there. The same mediocrity who was there when I arrived is still there -- only now he's in charge.
And so it goes. Will Andrew Luck deliver a better result than the last four years? Hard to say. But I know it would be difficult to be worse. His Stanford teams were extraordinary, so he has a knowledge base, and my guess is that he has a vision. I didn't ever get the sense that Muir had a vision other than worse/cheaper/fewer sports.
Audaces fortuna iuvat