I work in industry, but the key to getting stuff done in a hierarchical organization is tact. I think he is a poor politician, and is clearly very unhappy about being denied tenure. I think putting out feelers and going about a new job more quietly would be more effective.
Hypothetically, let's say you (the person reading this comment) want to make a big change in your organization. You identified a problem, and honestly think the solution is a fundamental change in direction. The incorrect next step is to bring up your opinion in front of the decision makers! This causes strife, anger, embarrassment, negative attention, etc.
The correct plan is to quietly gauge support, get allies, make your case one-on-one, and get things going with multiple stakeholders on board. No one embarrassed, the majority in agreement. Rocking the boat publicly (as this post clearly shows he is OK with) is not the mark of good political skills.
I'd agree that the way to appeal to management is to build relationships & grassroots support in the organization. But the way to appeal to the market (which seems to be his current situation now, since he seems to be looking for a new job) is to make a big splash, take credit for all the things you've done, define yourself in terms of what you'd most like to do, and then wait for the calls to come in.
The difference is on whether the set of people you work with is mutable or immutable. If it's immutable, you better preserve relationships, because you'll be working with them in the future, regardless of what happens, and you need them to implement your plans. But if it's mutable, then when people dislike you, just find new people. Stake out a territory in idea-space, and then just adjust the set of folks you hang out with until everyone agrees with you.
Voice or exit. If you want voice, you've got to speak to what the people around you will hear. If you're willing to exit (or going to anyway), you can say what you want and swap the people out until you find the set who hears you.
Interestingly, the current U.S. presidential race is a perfect example of this. Trump is following the people-are-mutable, if-they-don't-like-you-fuck-'em strategy. He's burning bridges with everyone who criticizes him. And he's probably doing this because it has worked for him in business - when he stiffs a contractor, sexually harasses an employee, or loses an investor's money, there is always somebody else willing to get in line behind them. Clinton, however, is the consummate relationship builder. She's carefully worked across the aisle through decades of experience in Washington, such that she's got all the really important people supporting her. Trump's strategy works great at rallies, where he can speak only to the people who agree with him, but fails across the entire electorate, where he has to deal with a pre-existing composition that isn't going anywhere.
> is to make a big splash, take credit for all the things you've done, define yourself in terms of what you'd most like to do, and then wait for the calls to come in.
I absolutely agree with this. At the same time, you should attempt to downplay the fact that the current set of people you work with found you such a massive pain in the arse that they didn't want you to stay.
The guy's accomplishments look impressive. He should concentrate on those.
The specifics of politics aside, I think there's always going to be a segment of the population that has total distaste and disdain for the homo politicus way of doing things. Every organization needs these people in order to counteract group think.
In the academic context I believe the set of people should be considered to be immutable, especially given small, specialized communities. When he goes on the market again, this post will be available for all to see, and the perception that he is problematic will follow.
The group of people you're working with may not be as mutable as you think. I've been working in my programming language community in the city where I live for about ten years. There are people I have worked with before at pretty much all the really attractive places that do the language I have the most expertise with. Probably people who know people I've worked with at many of the others too.
This also explains how Trump increased republican primary turnout while upsetting republicans. It's not that there are more trumpists than traditional republicans (the general election is proving that). It's that just that Trump did have plenty of support from outside the party that he could pull into the primary.
I think this is stated in a factually misleading / inaccurate way.
The vast majority of Trump voters are “traditional Republican” voters, at least in general elections. Many were folks who usually only turned out to vote in the general election, but not in the primary. In other words, they were expanding the pool of Republican primary voters, but not significantly expanding the pool of general election Republicans from “outise the party”.
Just to get back on track.. Faculty positions are very hard to fill.
As a tenured professor in a department looking exactly for this type of "Hacking Professor" I can tell you it may take a year to find talent. Positions in Europe might be even harder to fill. Advantage of our "biking distance from Amsterdam" culture is that anti-establishment mentality and non-conformist hear style of professors is acceptable. Quality research and teaching counts. We have an official CS class called "the Hacking Lab".
It did. The situation in the 1850s was actually very similar (party-wise) to now. The Whigs fell apart over slavery; the Northern anti-slavery wing blocked the nomination of incumbent Millard Fillmore. Northern Whigs rallied to the newly-created Republican party (with an anti-slavery platform), while what was left of the Southern Whigs formed the Know-Nothing party (with an anti-immigration platform). The Know-Nothings ran Millard Fillmore again as their candidate in 1856, then joined with Southern Democrats who were against secession to form the Constitutional Union party in 1860.
The Democrats themselves fell apart in 1860, splitting into Northern and Southern Democrats (running Douglas and Breckinridge, respectively). The split in the Democratic vote meant that Douglas (who was the second-highest popular vote getter) got the electoral votes of only one state, Missouri. This in turn meant that Abraham Lincoln, who wasn't even on the ballot in most Southern states, was able to carry the election, despite a popular vote count < 40% and net favorability ratings that were probably lower than Trump. This led directly to the Civil War.
Might sound corny but -there is no I in team -.
Great leaders bring change by assembling great teams where everyone gets their time to shine and don't take the credit for it. Everyone wins.
While it is certainly distasteful when someone takes credit for something that they had no involvement in, I would argue that it's also possible to too far in the other direction. All too many programmers (myself included!) won't take credit for anything unless they did 100% of the work. Well, as I'm slowly learning, it is possible to be nuanced. It is possible to take partial credit and to understand that saying that you led an effort doesn't automatically mean that you did 100% of the work.
Part of being a leader is convincing other people to listen to you. A very good way of doing that is to be able to point to publicly recorded instances where you've taken leadership in the past and delivered good results. If you don't take credit as a leader, you'll very soon find yourself displaced (for better or worse) by someone who does.
Great leaders bring change by assembling great teams where everyone gets their time to shine and don't take the credit for it.
Yes and no. Let's say your team has pulled off a major coup. As a (good) manager you very publicly say that all the credit belongs to the team. The team are happy and they love you. But the power players understand your real message.
This suggests that management is a duplicitous role. It shouldn't be. You publicly praise those who deserve it. You privately (i.e. in interviews) explain your personal involvement.
While this is true, senior job applicants are expected to be very explicit about their achievements. Instead of saying "my team completed the project on time and under budget" they'd say "I identified stakeholders, negotiated timescales, and personally managed a budget of x million", for example.
You know it seems obvious to you but I spend the last 10 years on the job knowing absolutely nothing about this. I'm a programmer and I have good social skills. As a trainer, talking in public comes naturally, as a team leader, I'm also quite good in conducting meetings and driving the team efforts.
But I have ZERO political skills, and I couldn't understand why.
Reading your comment is like finally getting the missing link. I never realized this was the basics of politics. I mean, I knew good politician did it, I saw them doing it among other things, but I could not comprehend it was the essence of it. No joking. Now I understand many things much better.
It may seems nothing to you, but you actually made my day.
And this is something that should be explained to more technical minded people, because otherwise, you can get very frustrated when you can't manage to influence things with good intentions in mind and a detrimental approach, while others seems to make it happen naturally.
Well, I guess now I have to practice a lot to get better at it. Seems a lot of work.
Agreed. Being political is a ton of work. I find doing what OP suggests, which amounts to silently taking responsibility for other people's feelings instead of openly communicating about them, to be taxing as hell. Putting on an emotional mask usually is.
Being "political" in this sense is a codependent behavior.
Instead of operating out of fear of others' reactions, I prefer to give people the space they need to feel their anger, embarrassment, etc. by checking in with them over how they feel & empathizing with them.
I'll also agree with OP that approaching people 1-on-1 about big changes is much easier than putting someone on the spot to be open about & own their emotions in front of a group of people. The group's likely been trained to "act professional" by hiding their emotions as opposed to being professional by producing quality work. Sadly, that's not the sort of culture typically found in a business.
The last engineer I worked with taught me a similar lesson after one of our last meetings: "You lost the moment you became emotional. Don't ever let people see your feelings in a meeting like that."
He was right about one thing: a group of "professionals" hates emotions. Go find a group of emotionally mature adults to work with & work on your own emotional maturity. Here are some hints for how to work on yourself that also acts as a list of mindsets to spot in others:
- nobody makes you feel anything
- you have a choice how to respond emotionally to all thing, though the amount of time your brain gives you to spot the choice may be unnoticeably small
- that spot can grow with practice (mindfulness meditation)
- whatever you're feeling in the moment is ok...you're allowed to feel it
- unpleasant feelings signal a fundamental human need going unmet...find the need & address/accommodate it
- everyone's doing the best they can and always have been...if someone isn't doing the best they can, the real culprit is you not accepting someone
- own your feelings...don't defend them, especially by blaming them on other people.
- apply all of this to every single person, including the worst of people.
- read "Nonviolent Communication" https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Lif...
I suspect something I came up with a few days ago would address this. It's based on the concept in this video: nxhx.org/maximizing/
The guy in the video suggests companies collect users' reasons for using products/services & feelings around those reasons. Companies would then be able to choose which reasons to design for.
The thinking goes like this:
Right now, companies use metrics based on how much things cost in terms of time/money/attention. Those are abstractions on top of our reasons, so if companies can create a system to directly measure our reasons, those more meaningful metrics will allow them to produce better products.
That idea doesn't get rid of the politics in companies...unless you remove the company from the equation when collecting user reasons.
My idea is to build a public blockchain-based system for collecting those reasons publicly & anonymously. If every company has a public user-generated set of reasons for using their product & whether or not the product is a good choice for fulfilling those reasons, the internal debate changes to which reasons should they choose to fulfill. Arguing over whether this or that change better fulfills this or that reason would be silly because testing the idea is the only thing that makes sense.
There'll still be politics around funding tests, among other things, because political people aren't just going to change how they act overnight, but I'm betting this system will give them far less to play with.
Or do what I do, express yourself like a human instead of a business machine, leave, go do the rejected right thing for a competitor, and send the product brochure to the people who cared more about their feelings than the work.
You have to be willing to do a lot of walking away, but the inevitable "you were right" has been satisfying so far.
Or I guess another way to say it is if you can, do, and if you can't, by all means, coddle. Just hope I don't end up across the table from you.
This is super passive aggressive, like a child saying "I'm leaving, you will miss me guys, you'll be sorry, you'll see I was right and I'll be the one laughting !".
Besides, this assumes people rejecting your idea are bad, while they are just being humans. Humans are weak unefficient creatures, it's no use to take offense in it, we all are weaks in some areas.
Or you could accept the situation for what it is: blind ignorance on the part of a leader. Then you can merrily do whatever's best for you without carrying around anger toward them.
Choosing to get offended is rarely a quick path to healthy productivity.
There's some really valuable truths in what you said. It takes years to discover, learn and master that and many people never come close to achieving those skills.
This is the kind of thing you learn by hard knocks or by a really caring mentor.
The highest-marginal-return skill to practice, in my experience, is to figure out where the mutual benefit in any arrangement is, and PRESENT THAT FIRST to each party involved. If it seems like things magically improve whenever you show up, most of the other issues go away.
Also, ensure that whatever you do makes your "superiors" look better, but make goddamned sure that it reflects their cleverness in choosing YOU for the job. If you're in academia and you write 99% of a grant that gets funded, put it on your CV. If you write a contract or a proposal that makes the company $5m, put it on your resume. Don't ever expect anyone to give you credit -- take it, and then thank whoever would logically be obligated to give it for their gracious acknowledgement. People seldom do what they know to be right -- they do what is convenient, then repent. So make it convenient for people to do the right thing for you.
Make it easy for people to appreciate your value and hard to fault your shortcomings. It goes a long, long way. If you can't do that, maybe look for a position where it will be easier for you to execute this task.
Good luck! You will be a happier person if you do this.
The problem with this approach is that it's tricky to take credit for when you get your way because you've done it so quietly. You have to have an organization and leadership that is wise enough to recognize what you've done.
you get the agreement quietly, such that when you speak publicly there is a general agreement on the statements you make in the group. hence you do get credit.
also note that if you (need to) push an idea, you shouldn't be the only one pushing it.
You should prevent the idea becoming tied to you as person.
Some people will just disapprove the idea because of the fact that it comes from you (instead of judging it by its merits).
The fact and reality that you are absolutely correct is a HUGE PART of the ENTIRE REASON why software startups so frequently outperform large incumbent companies with greater resources, support, investment, and time. Because while the software startup is messily, irritatingly, often horribly dealing with its people issues, it creates pods of productivity, small, coherent groups that work well together and make things happen without the need to wait until the lunch next Tuesday to gauge incumbent X's support for proposition Y before presenting proposition Y at gathering Z five weeks from now. In a successful startup, someone screams, "EUREKA!" summons one or two other minds from the team to a rickety little conference room, elaborates the idea to make sure he/she isn't missing anything obvious, and then starts working on it, possibly being finished by the end of a two-week sprint. What takes the incumbent organization MONTHS of political angling happens in these small, fluid organizations in WEEKS - or less!
I'm really quite glad your analysis is correct, because it creates massive opportunities for guys like me, who trend a bit on the abrasive side now and then, but it also discourages me as to the correct course of action to get any already-existibg institution into fighting shape. Is it potentially literally impossible under average circumstances? I worry it genuinely might be, and that creation of new institutionsay be the only answer, but that answer makes me very sad for some reason.
You're aware of "forming, storming, norming..." etc? It's a well-recognised problem. Smaller "abrasive" teams are very off-putting to some people; larger bureaucratic organisation are equally off-putting to others.
I suspect no one structure is optimal for all contexts.
Have a look at the design of the new Crick Institute in London, designed for serendipity. Or Facebook's attempt at an open plan office (probably not a great example, but you see the idea). Maybe even Taleb's ideas about anti-fragility (despite my finding him a terrible, turgid author).
He set out to improve things, which is a good goal. Improving means criticizing the status quo at some level. In case of academia, with tenured people lingering there for life, status quo is probably the result of their work (for better or for worse). Wanting to "improve" that was probably perceived as an insult something like "what you did before sucks, I'll make it better". Unless he was dealing with unusually rational colleagues, that stuff is never forgotten and surfaces at voting times.
But also playing devil's advocate here. It could also be that this is a "well the grapes are too sour anyway" type story. That is, maybe his research wasn't seen as very good, innovative or interesting to deserve a tenure. Maybe he knew it too so set out to instead focus on teaching and other aspects. I've seen people do that. Can't code so they become really strong proponents of documenting everything, or they look for other busy work to justify their salary. That is not necessarily all bad or wrong, but it is interesting to consider here. We haven't really heard from other side so to speak.
multiple NSF grants and multiple papers in top conferences - his research IS good, innovative and interesting. Also, a majority of the external letter writers had positive things to say.
Some people simply aren't politicians and will NEVER have any "tact", nor could they look themselves in the mirror if they faked it.
My suggestion to them is to start their own business or find one to work for (with a willing owner) that needs its core rocked or is full of straight-talkers.
We shouldn't typecast ourselves for a paycheck of it leads to misery.
Yes! So many people think because they are meek, everyone shall be meek, yet they are not the ones that achieve high performance. You might not be compatible with lower levels of performance when there are titles and honors given for meekly punching a ticket long enough and vis versa. I think he did exactly the right thing and would encourage others to do the same if an environment is compressing their thought and expression. Find your space, your people, and be great.
I wonder if there is any professional psychology on this kind of thing (link me!) but my layman observation is that most organizations tend toward median smoothing at best or lowest common denominator at worst for performance. That is of course not how you achieve high performance. But high performance scares lower performance, the conflict is bidirectional. From the article it's pretty obvious he was a high performer. High performance means having opinions. Opinions are contestable, and create conflict. Conflict is part of a high performance organization. Lower performers are terrified of conflict with higher performers. Therefore median and lowest common denominator organizations force high performers out. It's kind of ridiculous to think about that happening in academia, but today I learned!
When you switch to the arts and sports we LOVE to see extreme outliers and go to great lengths to assemble and prop them up. It's visceral excitement to see 320lb freaks of nature face off on a line of scrimmage in an NFL game. It would be cruel to have them face off against a highschool team or even just mix them in on the same line. Yet that kind of disparity happens all the time in other types of human assembly.
So I look at this from the other side. He did his deed at the University, made a mark, and got rejected for having high impact good, neutral, or bad. Some people were uncomfortable with high performance for reasons which could range from pettiness to valid criticism.
What you would call lack of tact I might call integrity. I am sure he will land somewhere else and do great things. Industry is more fluid and amenable to assembling high performance, especially in startups.
It's just tough to say whether he was truly "high impact" from his own article, giving his own opinions. Perhaps the research wasn't that good, perhaps the classes weren't that amazing. I don't know. Regardless, no one wants to work with someone who thinks they are god's gift to the world, even if they are! Which is where political / people / social skills can help immensely in avoiding career ending mistakes.
I was basing that after watching a few of these after reading the article where it is linked: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk97mPCd8nvbxGGfkYkBX.... I would have loved to had someone explain all these relevant things so clearly. I learned some stuff just from watching the few now even though I am a very senior internet person in industrial terms.
I did CS a rather strange way via military college so that's not the best sample, but when I took a programming languages class over the summer at Arizona State they had 300 students (yes really) in the lecture hall trying to learn C, C++, Scheme, and Prolog for the Sophomore/Junior level course. It was a total shit show, and if that had been my path to earning a degree and becoming a programmer I'd have hightailed it out of college. It's also an obvious head drop for diversity in the field. I've heard similar horror stories from colleagues from non-top tier CS schools. I'm inclined to believe he found and addressed problems, and had demonstrable success.
While you're 100% right, the key word to me here is "hierarchical organization" - and I remember my history teacher, the best I've ever had. She was demanding, on fire all the time - and most of other students and teachers hated her, but she was just extremely passionate and uncompromising, teaching from first principles (I've never learned as much from a teacher while in school). This tends to set mediocre people off, and she got really bitter in the end. All the skills OP is showing make him a bad fit for large places full of B and C people (i.e. all of academia and corporations) - while his healthy self-esteem, passion, a learning and teaching spirit, great writing, aspiration and the drive for simplicity and good UX (like in his courses) make him a perfect fit as a founder or early startup employee. He should be prepared to fight an uphill battle if he tries to stay in academia full time. If I were him, I'd try to do an industry career first before returning to teaching, I'm going down that route as well. Even my all-time hero of academia Feynman helped build the atomic bomb before returning to teaching first semesters.
I think no matter how good you are, you need to have people skills. You may be the best there is for this moment in time, but there's always someone better. And besides, you usually need a lot of people to do something sustaining.
I have another rule, along similar lines: Never introduce new information at a meeting.
We tend to decry "politics" as a dirty thing, and I'm no great fan of dysfunctional organizations. But even among bright, innovative people, I've observed what I think is the root cause of your rule:
Most people, especially managers, really don't like to debate and negotiate in front of an audience.
I'm like that myself. I think (could be wishful thinking of course) that I'm a high performer. But I'm a terrible debater. I'm not quick with facts, and I don't handle the emotional pressure of debate very well. I'd probably flunk a coding interview. I prefer to sit down and think something through, and to access the information that might not have been presented by the debaters. And in any event, I've noticed that most conclusions reached through debate in meetings are simply overturned by facts later on.
I agree. I also believe there are other good reasons for this rule. Imagine : 15 minute whiteboard workshop - "capturing value from meetings". We draw a horizontal line on the board, a relative value scale, lower to the left, higher to the right. Then we shout out a bunch of stuff people do in meetings, write them post it notes and try and arrange them on the scale. Once the stream starts drying up, draw a vertical line in the middle of the scale. It will now be reasonably obvious that what's clustered on the left can be loosely categorised as 'shit you could have emailed me' and what's clustered at the right as 'spontaneous interaction of informed participants'. Likely you can now demonstrate that stuff at the left - despite perhaps having intrinsically high value - is likely subtracting value in the context of a meeting. If you have good intuitions or hard data on time and travel, you can probably come up with a cost estimate.
I recommend trying this exercise with real people with the caveats that a) some of them will become angry, and b) probably most of them will ignore the outcomes unless you have some way of incentivising them not to.
A change requires orientation, energy, and whatever RoI. This guy - as he describes himself subjectively - is all about engaging his own energy. Orientation is essential and is expected to come from managers (dynamics). Managers also choose a strategy that improves the RoI (kinetics). Engagement is nevertheless absolutely essential to make change happen IRL (work). That's a pity an agreement couldn't be found with his managers. It seems there's kinda misunderstanding going on here, that should have been managed appropriately.
We can carry this a bit further. How does someone lacking these skills deal with students? I don't know all the details of his case, but I wonder how he handled grading inquiries and disputes with students, and how willing he was to adjust his teaching to meet the needs of the students.
And just to be clear, I'm well aware of claims (right or wrong) that teaching doesn't matter, but this is different from student evaluations of teaching.
The conversation seems to have drifted to a premise that when the other faculty didn't agree with him he called them morons. But the only basis for that is that he is being outspoken now. His contention is that simply by trying to be innovative and contributing is ways that might make other faculty look (deservedly) bad, he was punished.
The tenure vote he describes reminds me of the Blanket Party scene in Full Metal Jacket (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNqKrX1sx8), and I think it is the same lesson: conform or suffer the consequences.
Does not the requirement to match the politics of a workplace raise the bar too high, for a profession like university professor?
I am not saying that it is incorrect; but in the background of demands by multiple people inside a university, his actions - as described by him - do not seem to be so significant.
Plus, the academic job search/ tenure process is supposed to be a two-way thing (as any job search, I suppose). The university thinks about whether they want to hire you, and you think about whether you want to work with/ will get on with the people in the department. Tenure then comes down to being an accepted member of the community (among other thinngs).
Absolutely! And to be really good at this you need to learn to be tactful and diplomatic in all aspects of your life. Live and brief this philosophy towards all of your interactions with others. Become a politician.
> the key to getting stuff done in a hierarchical organization is tact. I think he was a poor politician
> Rocking the boat publicly (as this post clearly shows he is OK with) is not the mark of good political skills.
You're not wrong.
However shouldn't we be asking ourselves why we are requiring such skills?
The truth is that being a good politician has an inverse relationship with being a geek.
Peter Thiel has been pointing this out for many years. He asks, do we really have scientists anymore? Or are they really bureaucrats and politicians pretending to be scientists?
I am convinced it is the latter. I think we have whole universities filled with cargo cult science.
This relates neatly with some awkward facts about the modern education system.
For all the extraordinary efforts and feats of intellectual prowess it is also extraordinary how little they practically achieve. The number of breakthroughs has dramatically declined. Once you get past the PR bullshit and backslapping there is very little actually happening in many places in the 'innovation economy'.
Take nanotech. I am not aware of any advances that make their appearance in a consumer's home. I can think only of a handful of niche applications like expensive hydrophobic coatings. If the advances were occurring in the factories we should be seeing more refined low cost goods on a massive scale. Is that actually happening? I don't know that it is. We've been promised a lot and been waiting for long time.
Take biotech. Nothing. Just nothing. I think the last biotechnology I interacted with was a yogurt. Can anybody name a single biotech invention or innovation that actually exists in people's houses? In the 50s and 60s we had the Green Revolution, that counts. However the price of food has been rising considerably for several years now. There is certainly no food product that I consume that has become much cheaper.
The discovery of DNA is at least half a century ago. Despite much fanfare about CRISPR, why should we be sure that this time biologists are bringing home the bacon? Is anybody willing to bet that in ten years time there will be GM cool pets, much cheaper food, much cheaper quality wood for building from GM trees?
I would not take that bet.
What about energy? Willing to bet your energy bills get much lower in the future?
tldr; Maybe a whole lot of people are totally full of shit. The basic metric of progress is that things get cheaper, but they're not, so it isn't happening. If you're not willing to bet that prices decrease then maybe your confidence in the future of invention/innovation is misplaced.
Being a good manager means managing people. Dealing with people is easier when you have strong people skills. Conversely, if you put someone who has a toxic personality in charge of an organization, you might destroy the organization.
Again, I'm not saying anything about his talent, because it's impossible to know without hearing all sides, which I seriously doubt will happen. I'm saying that the article, his opinions, his actions, and from what his version of events are, is sending signals that he cannot get along with his superiors / peers in a way that is mutually constructive and beneficial.
Honestly, industry might be better for him, if he can find a benefactor willing to finance his research. But academia is petty and political, and from what I'm reading, his odds don't look good.
> But academia is petty and political, and from what I'm reading, his odds don't look good.
Yes, he should recalibrate his ideas of why he wanted to work in academia.
Today if you want to get ahead you need a patron and some people who know enough to bounce ideas off them.
I think it increasingly the case that universities are the worst place to send a real intellectual. Some of the most useless people in the world are respected here.
I've been to one, I'll say what I think. I think most university people are posers. Completely unfit. Institutionalized.
Then they are requested to perform. And they cannot. They like are those plants specialized to perform only in a certain Alpine microclimate.
Result: psychological sickness and poor pay. Employers don't know what to do with these people. And society insists on manufacturing more of them. It's a sick system, and it is best to get out while you're still honest.
Hypothetically, let's say you (the person reading this comment) want to make a big change in your organization. You identified a problem, and honestly think the solution is a fundamental change in direction. The incorrect next step is to bring up your opinion in front of the decision makers! This causes strife, anger, embarrassment, negative attention, etc.
The correct plan is to quietly gauge support, get allies, make your case one-on-one, and get things going with multiple stakeholders on board. No one embarrassed, the majority in agreement. Rocking the boat publicly (as this post clearly shows he is OK with) is not the mark of good political skills.