Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The line reads like a quiet rebuke to the cult of the moonshot. In business culture, vision is often framed as spectacle: the charismatic CEO, the transformative pivot, the overnight “disruption.” Kanter’s phrasing insists the real lever is usually smaller, less theatrical, and more repeatable. “I’ve found” signals practitioner knowledge over ideology; it’s not a slogan, it’s a field report. That matters in corporate environments where grand strategies die on the vine because no one believes change is survivable.

“Small wins” is the tell. It’s a management idea disguised as common sense: momentum is emotional before it’s operational. People don’t commit to a new direction because a deck says it’s inevitable; they commit because early, contained successes make the risk feel rational and the future feel tangible. The repetition of “small” works rhetorically the way iteration works organizationally: it lowers the stakes, then lowers them again, until resistance has nothing dramatic to push against.

The subtext is political in the office sense. “Small projects” create coalitions, expose hidden blockers, and generate proof that can travel across silos. They also protect the change-agent from the punitive economics of failure: a small bet can be written off as learning, while a big bet becomes a career verdict.

Kanter, a major voice in organizational change, is speaking to leaders and would-be reformers alike: stop waiting for permission, stop fetishizing scale, start engineering credibility. Huge differences aren’t always the result of heroic force; they’re often the compound interest of modest, well-chosen victories.