Rebels at Work

Chapter 1. Good Rebels, Great Work

Good rebels just want to do great work.

We want to improve things that aren’t working and that put our organizations at risk. Our motivation is not personal glory but introducing new ideas that can benefit our coworkers, customers, or community members. The greatest calling for rebels is helping our organizations evolve from what they are to what they can become, finding thoughtful ways to examine new ideas, identifying when and how to move on them, and taking the first step to get to a better place.

We realize the term “rebel” is loaded, so we’ll explain what we mean. At the most basic level, good rebels are for creating new, better ways to do things, while bad rebels just rail against what isn’t working. It’s easy to complain but much harder to figure out what could be done differently.

A few years ago, we created a chart that shows the difference between good and bad rebels (see Table 1-1). It has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and has shown up in tweets and presentations around the globe.

We believe it’s popular for three reasons. First, it summarizes common behaviors of rebels. Second, it refutes the “troublemaker” label that managers sometimes slap on thoughtful people trying to make positive change. And, perhaps more complex, it shows that many who start off as good rebels get so disillusioned that they end up joining the dark side, even though they started with good intentions. The frustration of trying to get people at work to listen ...