Successful and Unsuccessful

The unsuccessful drives out the successful.

I got an e-mail from an old coworker yesterday about a visit he had yesterday from an agency. It was his first visist, especially after he revised their operations in the industry we both work in. The result: a very successful audit and a vindication of the work he put in to revising the systems.

I was happy for my coworker - in our field of work, one seldom gets a such a vindication that the changes and work does are successful. At the same time it made me shake my head: this individual used to work at the company I am at. He could have employed this same level of dedication and diligence and change to where he was.

But he left - not because he didn't try, not because of a lack of trying, but because the company simply did not want to hear what he had to say, or the fact that the one saying it was someone that they did not consider to be of appropriate rank.

And so he went - off to another company, where (apparently) he's doing quite well.

There are many reasons that people, companies or movements fail. But one of the most obvious is that they lose the ability to hear the truth, or they lose the ability to hear the truth and act on it. What it results in ultimately is not a stronger company because the hierarchy was preserved and the "systems" worked; what it results in is people of talent and drive taken their skills somewhere else to where they are valued. Such people will succeed and more often than not, the companies or movements they are involved with will succeed too.

And the unsuccessful? They'll sit in the corner, badmouthing those the left and declaring them "difficult to work with" or "uncaring" or "not a team player".

It's not that they're not a team player - it's just that they are playing for teams that want to win.