Tempered radicals are informal leaders who quietly challenge prevailing wisdom and provoke cultural transformation within organizations. They embody contrasts by having firm commitments but flexible means, working alone yet uniting others. Tempered radicals effect gradual change through tactics like disruptive self-expression, verbal jujitsu, strategic alliance building, and being opportunistic. Disruptive self-expression in language, dress or behavior can slowly change workplace culture by inspiring discussion. Verbal jujitsu redirects negative statements into opportunities for positive change. Strategic alliances enhance legitimacy and power to implement change.

1. Radical Change, the
Quiet Way
by Debra E. Meyerson
If you want to push important cultural changes through your organization without damaging your career,
step softly.

2. How do you rock your corporate boat?
without falling out?
Yet many people who want to drive changes like these face an uncomfortable dilemma. If they speak out
too loudly, resentment builds toward them; if they play by the rules and remain silent, resentment builds
inside them.
A vice president wishes that more
people of color would be promoted.
A partner at a consulting firm
thinks new MBAs are being so
overworked that their families are
hurting.
A senior manager suspects his
company, with some extra cost,
could be kinder to the
At one point or another, many managers experience a pang of conscience—a yearning to confront the
basic or hidden assumptions, interests, practices, or values within an organization that they feel are
stodgy, unfair, even downright wrong.

3. What’s a manager to do?
Become a tempered radical —an informal
leader who quietly challenges prevailing
wisdom and provokes cultural
transformation.
These radicals bear no banners and sound no
trumpets.
Their seemingly innocuous changes barely
inspire notice. But like steady drops of water,
they gradually erode granite.

4. Why Tempered Radicals?
Tempered radicals embody contrasts.Their
commitments are firm, but their means flexible.
They yearn for rapid change, but trust in
patience.
They often work alone, yet unite others.
Rather than pressing their agendas, they start
conversations.
And instead of battling powerful foes, they
seek powerful friends.
The overall effect? Evolutionary—but
relentless—change.

5. Who are Tempered Radicals?
• They believe that direct, angry
confrontation will get them nowhere, but
they don’t sit by and allow frustration to
fester. Rather, they work quietly to
challenge prevailing wisdom and gently
provoke their organizational cultures to
adapt.
• Such change agents are tempered
radicals because they work to effect
significant changes in moderate ways.

6. Who are Tempered Radicals?
• People who differ from the organizational
status quo in some way—in values, race,
gender, or sexual preference, as they all see
see things A bit differently from the
“norm.”
• But despite feeling at odds with aspects
of the prevailing culture, they genuinely like
their jobs and want to continue to succeed in
them, to effectively use their differences as
the impetus for constructive change.

7. Tempered radicals use these tactics
Disruptive Self-expression
Verbal Jujitsu
strategic alliance building
variable-term opportunism,
Personal
Professional

8. Disruptive Self-Expression
Demonstrate your values through your
language, dress, office décor, or behavior.
People notice and talk—often becoming brave
enough to try the change themselves. The
more people talk, the greater the impact.
 Tempered radicals know that even the
smallest forms of disruptive self-expression
can be exquisitely powerful.

9. Disruptive Self-Expression
• At the most tempered end of the change
continuum is the kind of self-expression
that quietly disrupts others’ expectations.
Whether waged as a deliberate act of protest
or merely as a personal demonstration of
one’s values, disruptive self-expression in
language, dress, office decor, or behavior can
slowly change the atmosphere at work. Once
people take notice of the expression, they
begin to talk about it. Eventually, they may
feel brave enough to try the same thing
themselves.The more people who talk about
the transgressive act or repeat it, the greater
the cultural impact.

10. Disruptive Self-Expression
Demonstrate your values through your
language, dress, office décor, or behavior.
People notice and talk—often becoming
brave enough to try the change
themselves.The more people talk, the
greater the impact.
• At the most tempered end of the change
continuum is the kind of self-expression that
quietly disrupts others’ expectations.Whether
waged as a deliberate act of protest or merely
as a personal demonstration of one’s values,
disruptive self-expression in language, dress,
office decor, or behavior can slowly change
the atmosphere at work. Once people take
notice of the expression, they begin to talk
about it. Eventually, they may feel brave
enough to try the same thing themselves.The
more people who talk about the transgressive
act or repeat it, the greater the cultural
impact.
Tempered radicals know that even the smallest
forms of disruptive self-expression can be
exquisitely powerful.

11. Impressionable
• Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane was raised
in a nomadic village in the Islamic
Republic of Mauritania, where slavery is
the norm. For his seventh birthday, he
received his first slave, which was as
normal to him as picking out a toy or a
new bike.
• Gradually, he came to realize that
slavery was wrong. But publicly
challenging the status quo in
Mauritania would have gotten him
arrested and possibly killed. So as a
teenager, Ethmane began arranging
private discussion groups on slavery.
Eventually, he founded SOS Slaves, an
international organization dedicated to
ending slavery. He has also worked as
an adviser for the United Nations Office
forWest Africa and is a council member
of the Human Rights Foundation.
• When Ethmane turned 12, his parents sent
him to Mauritania’s capital to receive a
formal education. Soon, he became an
avid reader with an interest in world
history and found out that other countries
had outlawed slavery long ago.

12. Impressionable
• Burundi is ranked among the worst countries
for women, so it’s not surprising that many
men there are raised to beat their wives.This
happened with Faustin Ntiranyibagira.Though
his father was an abusive drunk, Ntiranyibagira
admitted, “I envied him. [ . . . ] I told myself that
one day I would get married so that I could also
have a woman and children to whom I would
give orders.
• Then he started attending community
development meetings with the relief
agency CARE.There, he learned about
nonviolent conflict resolution and
came to see the value in an equal
partnership with his wife. So he
stopped beating her, began helping her
with household chores, and
collaborated with her when it came to
finances. Now Ntiranyibagira arranges
public meetings to speak out against
domestic violence and teach his male
friends to treat their wives better. His
message is one of peace, nonviolence,
and gender equality.
• Ntiranyibagira did beat his wife. He also
encouraged his friends at the local bar to
beat their wives because he believed there
was no better way to run a household

13. Verbal Jujitsu.
• Redirect negative
statements or actions into
positive change.
 Employees who practice
verbal jujitsu react to
undesirable, demeaning
statements or actions by
turning them into
opportunities for change
that others will notice.
 One form of verbal jujitsu involves calling attention to the
opposition’s own rhetoric.
 Managers can use verbal jujitsu to prevent talented employees,
and their valuable contributions, from becoming inadvertently
marginalized.

14. Variable-Term Opportunism
• Be ready to capitalize on
unexpected opportunities
for short-term change, as
well as orchestrate
deliberate, longer term
change.
 Tempered radicals must be
creatively open to opportunity. In
the short-term, that means being
prepared to capitalize on
serendipitous circumstances; in the
long-term, it often means
something more proactive.
Remaining alert to such
variable-term opportunities
And being ready to capitalize on
them
Are essential.

15. Quaker Oat
• In the 1990’s Quaker Oat Company was rolling in
profits from their dry foodstuffs business, so they
branched out and acquired the Gatorade sports drink
franchise from Stokley. Flush with that success, they
later acquired trendy bottled tea maker Snapple for
$1.7 billion in a leveraged buyout.
• Distribution companies learned this
and priced accordingly; robbing
Snapple of funds badly needed for
marketing and R&D. Triarc
eventually bought the failing
Snapple business from Quaker for
$300 million.
• “In retrospect,” said one Quaker
executive on the merger, “we
should have had someone arguing
the “no” side.”
• To their horror, Quaker soon learned that unlike all
their other products—including Gatorade– Snapple
beverages required refrigeration.A panic inventory
revealed that Quaker had a shining fleet of exactly
zero refrigerated vehicles to distribute Snapple.

16. Quaker Oat
• Created in 1971, Xerox PARC was the copier
company's attempt to work on technology
transfer—birthing new innovations and
bringing them to market. And by 1973 it
had come up with some fascinating stuff.
There was the Graphical User Interface
(GUI), the computer mouse and the
Ethernet to connect computers. But by
1979,Xerox still wasn't doing anything with
with these extremely cool ideas.That same
year, a 24-year-old Steve Jobs, fresh from
the success of his Apple 2 computer, visited
the PARC complex.
• Jobs, gawking at the GUI, begged his hosts
to let him bring some Apple staffers back
to check it out. A PARC administrator
warned Xerox higher-ups that showing off
the GUI would risk a tremendous asset,
but his bosses said, in effect, "Oh, let Jobs
ogle your little point-and-clickOS toy all he
wants . . . we're busy making copiers here.“
In the course of an hour-long
demonstration to the Apple crew, Xerox
successfully transferred their technology
into the fertile minds of Jobs and his team.
As Jobs later said, Xerox "could have owned
the entire computer industry."

17. Strategic Alliance Building.
Gain clout by working with allies. Enhance
your legitimacy and implement change
more quickly and directly than you could
alone. Don’t make “opponents” enemies—
they’re often your best source of support
and resources.
 So far, we have seen how tempered radicals,
more or less working alone, can effect change.
 What happens when these individuals work
with allies?Clearly, they gain a sense of
legitimacy, access to resources and contacts,
technical and task assistance, emotional
support, and advice. But they gain much
more—the power to move issues to the
forefront more quickly and directly than they
might by working alone.

18. Jesse Owens And His Nazi Shoes
• The 11th Olympic Games of the modern era was held in Berlin in 1936. It would go down in history as the
“NaziGames,” a vehicle of unabashed self-promotion for Adolf Hitler and his regime
• Jesse Owens won four golds in Berlin, for the 100
meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4×100 meter
relay. He was the acknowledged superstar of the
Olympics.What is less known is that he got a little
help from a member of the Nazi Party named
Adolf “Adi” Dassler, a shoemaker whose company,
Gebruder Dassler Schuhfabrik, specialized in track
and field footwear. Dassler came to the Olympic
Village with the intention of having as many
athletes as possible wear his shoes. Dassler did not
have the marketing and advertising tools to
promote his brand, so everything had to be done
by word of mouth.
Dassler approached his friend and the coach
of the German track team, JoWaitzer, who
supported his endeavor to design running
shoes that would improve the performance
of track athletes.Waitzer agreed to
persuade the runners even from other
national teams to try out the shoes. Having
read about Owens’s performances in the
Olympic trials, Dassler was particularly
interested in getting the shoes on the
American’s agile feet

19. Jesse Owens And His Nazi Shoes
• The 11th Olympic Games of the modern era was held in Berlin in 1936. It would go down in history as the
“NaziGames,” a vehicle of unabashed self-promotion for Adolf Hitler and his regime
• Dassler urgedWaitzer to hand out some
shoes to Owens.The coach was hesitant, as
he knew his life could be put in danger if the
authorities ever found out he was in contact
with the African-American star.
• Nevertheless,Waitzer braved the risk and
smuggled two or three pairs to Owens, all
personally crafted by Adi himself.They were
made of glove leather, reinforced at the
heels and toes with six track spikes. It was
pretty much state-of-the-art at the time..
Owens won the 100 meters in his German shoes,
and by the third pair,Owens said he wanted only
those shoes or none at all. He became the
unwitting first pitchman for the product. Berlin
was soon abuzz that the impressive black
American had accomplished his record-setting
feats in shoes made in the smallGerman village
of Herzogenaurach. Dassler’s sales skyrocketed.
It was worldwide prominence after that for the
shoe company everyone knows today from Adi
Dassler’s name—Adidas.