The third time to Be a Quitter when what you are doing isn’t working. It goes back to the maxim “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

It’s hard to admit you are wrong; that the idea you’ve invested your time and money, blood, sweat and tears into just isn’t working. But,when you reach that point—as we all have—you’ve got to know when to quit. Otherwise, your Buggy Whip Company will still be manufacturing product in the era of the fuel-injected engine.

I invested 16 years of my life in my second career. I had challenging-to-acquire licenses and certifications galore, and was among the most decorated echelon of people in my industry. But I came to the point that I realized both what we were doing, and the way we were doing it just wasn’t working any more. To the astonishment of my mouth-agape peers I walked away and began speaking about the knowing harm our industry was doing to innocents. One far more dedicated and respected peer said of it all “Well, I just keep hoping things will get better.” Argh! That’s like the pig standing in line at the slaughter plant waiting his turn at the stun-gun just hoping people will suddenly quite eating pork. Don’t stand there and keep hoping. RUN!

In the next blog post—the Final Installment in this series—Why we are reluctant to quit & and a surprising revelation about Jesus.

The second time when its OK to Be a Quitter is when people are doing the wrong thing.

Sometimes even groups of people founded on a good premise can morph into groups that do the wrong thing. Groups of not-necessarily-bad teen agers have turned into drunken masses when someone got the bad idea to take a wrong turn. History is full of splinter groups from churches that started out loving Jesus and turned into sex and suicide saturated footnotes of history.

A few years ago a pastor whom I loved and been taught by for five years said in one of his sermons that homosexual behavior wasn’t a sin. (Clearly unBiblical and a position I’m told he has recently publicly recanted.) I didn’t leave the church. I engaged the elders. Because the topic was hot and the conversation was too painful they abdicated their responsibility to deal with it. (A temptation any of us would face.) Ultimately my pastor sent me an email in which he said that I just needed to “submit.” Hmmm. Funny how parts of an Evangelical’s Bible have authority and other parts don’t, isn’t it.

I led my family away from that congregation. You’ve got to know when to quit.

Coming up in the next post: The third time when its OK to be a quitter.

The first time it’s OK to Be a Quitter is when the herd is going the wrong way.

Sometimes you find yourself in a large group of people moving in a direction, and your intuition, instincts, or perhaps its God speaking to you that causes you to realize “Success and achievement isn’t down this road. We are going the wrong direction.” I don’t think you should rush to quit. You should instead seek to influence and direct. But if you can’t steer the group in the right direction, at some point you have to step outside the herd and say “I’m not going. I quit.”

Beware that when you quit, you’ll have suddenly become an outsider and you’ll start taking shots from your former colleagues who remain inside. A friend recently helped me understand that when he said “Barry, they are throwing rocks at you because they are afraid. They know that you have already made a decision that they are eventually going to have to make for themselves.” Indeed. Those who remain in the safety of the herd still live with the fear that the one who has left the herd might be right, and nobody wants to wind up being wrong. (Though it doesn’t have to end in an “I am right. You are wrong” sort of way.) As their internal pressure builds the only outlet they can see is to attack the one who left the herd.

Coming on the next post: The second time when it’s OK to quit.

Do you remember when you were a kid on the playground and things weren’t going your way, maybe you would walk away from the game the group was playing only to hear someone yell out, “Quitter?”

Did you ever take up an instrument that someone had made look easy and fun to play (because they had practiced) only to want to quit when your parents made you practice, except you couldn’t quit because when they bought you the instrument you had to promise them that you wouldn’t quit for a year?

As a kid, did you ever join an athletic team during the energetic days of Spring, promising that you’d play all season, only to find that practicing in the overbearingly dusty and hot days of summer was suddenly more work than play. But you grind onward because you don’t want to be a quitter.

Refusing to quit is ingrained in the American psyche. It’s part of what makes us strong as people and collectively as a country. I remember hearing a speaker deliver Churchhill’s admonition when I was a teen-ager “Never. Never. Never. Give up!” And I resolved then and there that I was tough, and I was strong, and I had character, and I had constitution, and I could win on perseverance alone. I would never give up.

I remember being a 23-year-old young man who wanted to start a church only to hear an older and supposedly wiser pastor say “You can’t succeed in starting a church out in that part of town. You aren’t educated enough. You aren’t old enough. You don’t have enough money. You’ll fail.” I was incensed and inflamed by my mentor’s words and I impetuously resolved to prove him wrong. There were 964 people in services my last Easter in that church seven years later. I succeeded, but the personal cost was great and the emotional crash came hard.

The virtue of persistence must be balanced with the wisdom of knowing when to say “enough.” Quitting to0 early may be a sin, but there is no sin in quitting.

Coming in the next post: When to Be a Quitter

In what way do you want your organization—your team—to lead in 2011? Here’s a great way to get them off on the right foot.

Rent the movie Invictus. It’s about Mandella’s recognition that he needed to unite South Africa and his use of the white national South African Soccer to do that. They went on to win the World Cup.

Lock the office door, shut off the phones, and show the movie to your team. After its over, sit around a table and talk about the movie, particularly it’s leadership themes. Simple ask your team to be on the look out for leadership threads in the movie.

You’ll be amazed at the inspiration and the lessons that come from Invictus. Learning them will help you to lead your tribe in the right direction in 2011.

You’re welcome.