Practical Radicals

Meyerson calls such events "small wins" and regards them as a central strategy for effective radicals. For one thing, the approach nicely reduces large problems to ones that are easier to manage. More importantly, small wins are inherently less risky. "What these people do is push back and negotiate resistance. They test the system, subtly challenging norms. They prod gently, because that's all the system can take."

Indeed, tempered radicals understand, either instinctively or through painful experience, what the organizational limits are. Kirk Tucker, 56, who heads planning and strategy for Harley-Davidson's big York, Pennsylvania motorcycle manufacturing plant, was reassigned midway through his engineering career when he pressed too hard and too early for organizational changes. He realizes now that "you have to recognize how far you can push. If you push it too far, you will become ineffective. When you're ineffective, you put yourself at risk. One mentor told me years ago, 'Have patience. It's going to take them a while to figure out that you're right.' "

At PricewaterhouseCoopers, partner Monique Connor, 35, finds satisfaction in the smallest of victories. She quit the security of the tax-consulting track to get her MBA and rejoin the firm in human resources, hoping to press for broad cultural change. But such change, she understands, arrives in increments. "Just changing the language of an organization can be a huge success. In a lot of the work that we do with partners, we'll invent scenarios for illustration and populate them with 'she's. That represents a real cultural shift here."

Negotiating those small wins, though, represents no small task; like any change, they require organizational capital and political savvy. Roger Saillant knows that, whatever else he does, he has to contribute to Visteon's bottom line. "Once I do that, they become increasingly forgiving with regard to some of the other things I want to pursue." When Jacqui MacDonald, 49, head of fair trade at the Body Shop, pushed for fair-trade reforms, she made sure that she accommodated the pricing and delivery demands that the Body Shop's purchasing managers were facing. "To be effective, you had to talk their language and help them solve their problems," she says.

At the other end of Meyerson's continuum are tempered radicals who explicitly pursue organizational change. Less tempered, often with less invested in the organization, "they're taking bigger personal risks, trying to rattle the system. They're still concerned about their own authenticity -- but they want bigger changes. They turn that series of microinteractions into bigger opportunities."

Dixie Garr, 45, Cisco Systems's VP of customer-success engineering, continually creates opportunities for herself and others. She mostly says exactly what's on her mind, aiming to "shock people so that they think." While she's tempered enough to have survived five big corporate employers, she's also an unabashed system rattler.

Garr was the youngest of eight kids growing up in tiny Dubach, Louisiana. Neither of her parents finished junior high school, but they were radical thinkers around Dubach. "They helped me understand that I didn't have to buy into the things I heard around me," Garr says. She didn't. As a young engineer at Texas Instruments, for example, she told a manager that she wanted to become an executive at the company. "He laughed at me. I had only been there for two years. It was totally outside his way of thinking, especially coming from a black woman. But he later worked for me."

Finding TI to be less than inclusive of diversity, Garr was founding chair of the company's Minority Leadership Initiative, and she fought for the promotion of African-Americans. At Cisco, she battles for diversity of a different sort. With every second or third job opening under her control, she aims to hire someone about whom people will say, " 'You hired him?' He'll be someone who brings a different perspective, a kook -- and he'll turn out to be wonderful."

A tempered radical, Garr says, "must not compromise on the vision, but must be flexible on the approach. You have to broach ideas that go against the natural instinct of the organization -- but you have to do that in a palatable way. Organizations have antibodies, just like people. It's important that you deliver change in such a way that the antibodies don't totally attack it before it's had a chance to grow."

The Lonely Work of Making Change

Meyerson proposes that in an effective change environment, radicals across the spectrum of temperedness ought to complement each other and work together to effect change. Yet more often, she says, radicals at different points on the continuum mistrust and alienate one another. Those at the more radical pole chide what they see as the timidity of those who are more tempered, while those at the tempered pole are put off by the aggressiveness of those who are more radical.