A tiny fleck of dirt was all it took to stop it from working.
I have a plumbers torch that I use to get kindling started. You’ve probably seen them; it’s a moderately heavy brass nozzle that fits on the top of a small propane tank. It’s worked for years – that is, until yesterday. It just wouldn’t light for more than a second; the flame would just blow itself out.
When I took the thing apart, I discovered a small fleck of dirt, almost the size of half of the period at the end of this sentence. I cleaned it away, and voila, good as new.
Sometimes, a relatively small fleck, one person, that is, inside a large organization can stop the organization from working. One disruptive individual. One imagined victim. One complainer. All it takes is cleaning him or her away to bring the entity back to health.
It’s not the people that you have to fire that ruin your organization; it’s the people you should have fired but didn’t.
