Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

A “revolving door” is a brutal image for something corporate press releases try to dress up as “leadership transition.” Kanter’s line lands because it treats executive churn as a symptom, not a strategy: when performance sours, boards and stakeholders reach for the most visible lever they can pull, even if it doesn’t touch the underlying mechanics of decline. The metaphor does double duty. It’s not just that leaders exit quickly; it’s that the organization isn’t going anywhere. Motion replaces momentum.

The intent is diagnostic and a little prosecutorial. Kanter is warning that serial CEO swaps often function as ritualized accountability - a public sacrifice meant to reassure markets, employees, and media that someone is “doing something.” The subtext is that a losing streak is usually systemic: incentives misaligned, culture brittle, strategy incoherent, execution compromised. In that environment, a new executive becomes both savior and scapegoat, set up to fail by the same constraints that sank the predecessor. The door keeps spinning because the problem was never a single person.

Context matters: Kanter’s career has been built on studying organizational change, empowerment, and why institutions resist reform. From that vantage, leadership turnover can signal panic, not renewal. It can also be self-reinforcing: instability at the top encourages short-termism, freezes mid-level decision-making, and drains trust. People stop betting on long arcs when the storyteller changes every quarter.

The line works because it punctures a comforting myth: that replacing a figurehead is the same as fixing the ship. It’s a warning label for anyone tempted to confuse movement with progress.