Using the case of Indian Railways, we examine two competing perspectives on performance improvement. The radical change perspective advocates retrenching excess costs and assets, restructuring top management and repositioning the organization. The Organization Development (OD) perspective, on the other hand, calls for initial swift discontinuous change in one part of the organization followed by slower incremental changes in the rest using a largely participative approach. Indian Railways was able to radically improve its performance between 2004 and 2008 without restructuring, repositioning or retrenching. Performance was radically improved by changing entrenched mindsets relating to the role of the organization and its business models. The paper offers a nuanced view of bringing about radical performance enhancement in large, public organizations and contributes to the understanding of the continuous change or OD perspective.