Change Agent - Issue 35

Third, most torchbearers don't realize how unique they are, how powerful their role is, or how hard their task is. Even though they could make outrageous demands and insist on all kinds of special treatment, most of them are happy just to perform their role and to handle their task.

Fourth, torchbearers often care more about forward motion than they do about which route to take. You won't find them tied up in endless strategy meetings, looking for the perfect solutions. Instead, you'll find them out on the road, picking their way through boulders and weeds -- moving, moving, moving, because they realize that moving is often the best way to get where they're going.

Fifth, and most important, real torchbearers don't stop until they finish. In the life of any torchbearer, there's a balance between devotion to duty and the pursuit of joy. A torchbearer never forgets about or shortchanges a duty, even when that means postponing joy.

In established companies, the refrain that I hear most frequently is "Well, we'd be doing great if [insert person or department, along with pejorative adjective] would just get [his/her/its] act together." Many previously great companies, both big and small, are having a lot of trouble dealing with all of the changes and rifts that the new economy is bringing to their doorsteps. Why? Because in many companies, the torchbearers have left the building. Either the folks in charge have forgotten what it takes to practice true leadership (after all, they've made it, the company has hit its marks, and now it's "Miller time"), or they've left and been replaced by a different kind of management.

The point here isn't that people in top management are unwilling to embrace change. The point is that the people who are busy pointing fingers and whining about "those guys" are demonstrating that they're not torchbearers.

If you're waiting for someone else to lead you to a better way of doing business, then reckon with this Olympic-size news flash: Settle in. It's going to be a long wait.

All of a sudden, in every company in every country, torchbearers are in high demand. Everybody is trying to figure out where to go. And, much more important, they're trying as hard as they can to find someone who will take them there: someone who will walk through walls and over hot coals, someone who won't give up until the job is done.

Intrinsic to being a torchbearer is recognizing that you bear the torch for someone else. In our increasingly "me"-centered society, it's easy to worry about increasing the value of the Brand Called You, while letting someone else carry your company's or your investor's torch. Torchbearers do both.

In a small town in Georgia, a woman named Karen Watson faced such a challenge head-on. Several years ago, her friends and neighbors were complaining about the way that blacks in that town were treated. There was an undercurrent of racism, and, in particular, blacks were being tracked to lower-level classes in school.

For a while, Watson and her neighbors appealed to civil-rights organizations, waiting for some big shot to come to town and save them. Then it dawned on Watson that maybe, just maybe, nobody was ever going to come -- and that the person who could make a difference was her.

So she stood up and took charge. She taught herself what she needed to know. She made a commitment. And the organization that she built, the Positive Action Committee, has made a huge difference in her community, generating change in several areas. Watson took responsibility -- for her town and for her neighbors' town. She is a torchbearer.

So could you be a torchbearer? Are torchbearers born or made? Here's my guess: Many of us have the torchbearer gene, but for some of us, it lies dormant until something awakens it. Some parents raise their children to be torchbearers from birth. Others do whatever they can to persuade their kids to hide it. We're certainly not organizing our schools or our society to reward children who demonstrate torchbearer qualities.

But I think that you can awaken the torchbearer within. I think that most people, given the right reason, can find the intestinal fortitude to carry a flame across the finish line.

Now, I'm not talking about working hard, or being dedicated, or putting your mission first. Being a torchbearer has nothing to do with how late you work at night, or whether you give your cell-phone number to your boss. No, I'm talking about the people with that rare skill, the ability to dig deep when the need arises -- to get past the short-term pain and to pull off an act that few would have believed possible.

In the new economy, people are doing things that have never been done before. Faced with the unprecedented, in an environment that's unstable, many people say, "It can't be done." The torchbearer is the one who does it. Roger Bannister did more than set a record when he ran a mile in less than four minutes. He showed the world that anyone else could do that as well. He broke a time barrier, and he changed the way that everybody trained for a race.

Are you a torchbearer? Probably. The challenge is to find the right project, the right challenge, the right moment -- and then to do it. Once you've shown that you can do that, the world will beat a path to your door.

Seth Godin (sgodin@fastcompany.com) is the author of "Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers" (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and the founder of Yoyodyne Entertainment.