Now that ChrisAn is blogging again, and I'm sitting at home in bed (not feeling well) and reading through it (praise be to wireless), something in one of his posts got me to thinking.
I think it's true that Microsoft's willingness to make major course corrections does show a measure of viability and agility that you wouldn't see from many other large companies. It's got its downside too, I sure wish everything went as planned every now and then and it didn't happen that way but that's the world we live in. I remember back in college learning about the stages of a company's lifecycle and something about companies that recognize problems earlier live and those that don't die. I should look it up, it's interesting. But I digress.
What got me to thinking was how this relates to what I'm reading about the messages coming out of the Republican National Convention this year about how great Bush is for "staying the course" and "not bending to public opinion" and all of that. I did that too when I was 6 by puttiing my fingers in my ears and yelling "I can't hear you I can't hear you" but okay maybe that was different.
My point here is this: in one set of circumstances we praise leaders for being agile, adaptive, realistic, and risk-managing. And I don't mean being wishy washy of refusing to take hang it out there-- CEOs who do that get fired too. But in party politic, it's somehow a good thing (for some people) to "show leadership" by blindly charging ahead, and the folks who are praising that in politics are precisely the ones who would condemn it on the business side.