Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Kanter’s move here is less a cute metaphor than a management power play: she’s borrowing the emotional machinery of sports to describe how organizations spiral upward or downward. “Positive path vs. negative path” is careful, almost clinical language, but she immediately swaps it for “winning streaks and losing streaks” because streaks feel lived. They’re visceral, legible, and contagious. You don’t need an MBA to understand the dread of a losing streak or the swagger of a winning one.

The intent is to reframe corporate performance as momentum rather than isolated results. A “streak” implies pattern, belief, and feedback loops: small wins build confidence, confidence invites risk-taking, risk-taking produces more wins. The subtext is a warning to leaders who treat culture and morale as soft stuff. In streak logic, psychology is the product. People start acting like winners or losers long before the spreadsheet confirms it.

There’s also a subtle critique of how companies narrate themselves. Sports language licenses simplified storytelling: heroes, slumps, comebacks. That can rally a workforce, but it can also excuse structural issues by blaming “momentum” instead of strategy, incentives, or inequality inside the firm. Kanter, a scholar of change and innovation, is signaling that perception and performance are entangled: organizations don’t just execute plans, they perform confidence.

Context matters: in late-20th-century corporate America, where “turnarounds” became a genre and CEOs were marketed like coaches, streak-talk translates complex change management into a script people will actually follow.