I wrote a blog on change leaders that get forced out of the orgs they are trying to change. I’ve seen far too many great people either forced out, let go, or leave in frustration from the companies that need them most. I’m about to publish it so any comments welcome!
Change leadership is in a way what Organizational SCRAP - the book - is about, so concepts like this will be part of it.
Good stuff @GeorgeSchlitz
One minor edit - you misspelled “legitimate“.
Most of my study lately has been around misaligned expectations or differing Orientations (mental models) in organizations.
For example, at the last client I worked for everyone was onboard with the Agile Transformation. The problem was that Product expect us to fix Engineering and Engineering expected us to fix Product. So nobody wanted to change, the just wanted “them” to change.
This is good, but wasn’t necessarily the issue in my case. The reason I left was that leadership was the problem. They wanted a top down Accenture Style PMO because they hired a bunch of execs wanting to do what they’ve always done. Competing priorities. They hated the Agile / Lean transformations because it didn’t fit their waterfall style of project management. They would tell the existing leadership, that they have more experience on larger initiatives and this is how it must be done, and I fought with my own boss more than anything. They would pay lip service to things and say they wanted people to be engaged, and transparency, etc… But you had to do it there way with all their templates and documents. There was some element of this in what you talk about with my peers, because what I was doing was a threat to Andrews Dean’s Monolithic Architecture rule over everything, etc… so he went behind my back to bash me and what I was doing to others. I left because of leadership, not the good work that we had already done.
Definitely differences, @SeanWBuck - and a few similarities. The blog was written with a large number of change leaders in mind, and pulls in aspects of different situations and as such won’t exactly align with any of those change leaders (yourself especially 
).
What’s similar is that the system wasn’t really behind your change - it stood for something else, was probably threatened by yours, and it used some tactics of attacking your brand and you in some cases.