The point here isn't that people in top management are unwilling to embrace change. It's going to be a long wait. All of a sudden, in every company in every country, torchbearers are in high demand. Everybody is trying to figure out where to go. Intrinsic to being a torchbearer is recognizing that you bear the torch for someone else.
Torchbearers do both.
In a small town in Georgia, a woman named Karen Watson faced such a challenge head-on. Several years ago, her friends and neighbors were complaining about the way that blacks in that town were treated. There was an undercurrent of racism, and, in particular, blacks were being tracked to lower-level classes in school. For a while, Watson and her neighbors appealed to civil-rights organizations, waiting for some big shot to come to town and save them. So she stood up and took charge.