Ciaran Doyle

“The general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens, conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the eventual establishment of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity. When a church which was all-embracing relaxes its hold, new religious movements are likely to crystallize. H. G. Wells remarks that at the time of the Reformation people “objected not to the church’s power, but to its weaknesses…. Their movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control.”26 If the religious mood is undermined by enlightenment, the rising movements will be socialist, nationalist or racist. The French Revolution, which was also a nationalist movement, came as a reaction not against the vigorous tyranny of the Catholic Church and the ancient regime but against their weakness and ineffectuality. When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Heuristics for testing your goals Assess your goals using these guidelines: Does your goal start with a verb (“launch,” “build,” “refactor,” etc.)? Then you probably have an action, so reframe it to describe the outcome you want. Often, this takes the form of translating “X so that Y” into “Y via X” (and consider if you need X in there at all). A helpful trick to figure out the proper framing is to read the goal out, ask yourself why, answer that question, then do that a couple of times until the true goal comes into focus. (See Table 2 for an example.) Do you have “engineering goals” and “business goals,” or something similar? Stop it. Are your goals more than one page, more than three to five objectives, or more than three to five KRs per objective? No one will read them—let alone remember them. When you (or your team) look at your goals, do you wince and think, “What about X? I was really hoping to get to that this quarter”? If not, you probably haven’t focused enough, and your goals are not adding value. Could one team member think a goal is achieved and another one completely disagree? Then your goal isn’t specific enough. (By contrast, if everyone feels it’s mostly successful but the assessments range from 60–80 percent done, who cares?) Can you imagine a scenario where the goal is achieved but you’re still dissatisfied with where you ended up? Then your goal isn’t specific enough, or an aspect is missing. Could you be successful without achieving the goal? Then your goal is overly specific, and you should rethink how to define success.”
― Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building