"Movement isn't progress"
About this Quote
“Movement isn’t progress” is the kind of sentence that sounds like common sense until you realize how often modern work culture is built to deny it. Leonard, a businessman best known for helping popularize coaching, is aiming at a familiar corporate pathology: busyness as a substitute for results. The line draws its power from a blunt semantic correction. “Movement” evokes motion, urgency, the pleasing optics of activity. “Progress” demands direction, measurement, and consequence. By splitting the two, Leonard punctures a workplace illusion: that energy automatically equals advancement.
The intent is practical, almost managerial. It’s a warning against mistaking inputs (meetings, emails, reorganizations, “alignment”) for outcomes. The subtext is sharper: much of what organizations reward is legible activity, not effective change. Movement is easy to display and hard to audit; progress is the opposite. So people default to what can be seen. A calendar packed with calls looks like leadership. A flurry of initiatives looks like strategy. Leonard’s line exposes the incentive structure behind performative productivity.
Context matters. Late-20th-century business culture was accelerating: more communication channels, more process frameworks, more “change management.” That era also helped normalize the idea that constant motion is a virtue in itself. Leonard pushes back with a coach’s clarity: if you can’t name the destination, motion becomes a treadmill dressed up as ambition.
It works because it’s both diagnosis and dare. It forces the listener to answer an uncomfortable question: if you stopped moving, would anything actually break - or would the absence of noise finally reveal what matters?
The intent is practical, almost managerial. It’s a warning against mistaking inputs (meetings, emails, reorganizations, “alignment”) for outcomes. The subtext is sharper: much of what organizations reward is legible activity, not effective change. Movement is easy to display and hard to audit; progress is the opposite. So people default to what can be seen. A calendar packed with calls looks like leadership. A flurry of initiatives looks like strategy. Leonard’s line exposes the incentive structure behind performative productivity.
Context matters. Late-20th-century business culture was accelerating: more communication channels, more process frameworks, more “change management.” That era also helped normalize the idea that constant motion is a virtue in itself. Leonard pushes back with a coach’s clarity: if you can’t name the destination, motion becomes a treadmill dressed up as ambition.
It works because it’s both diagnosis and dare. It forces the listener to answer an uncomfortable question: if you stopped moving, would anything actually break - or would the absence of noise finally reveal what matters?
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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