Culture
Quotes
“Your culture is your competitive advantage.”
- Gavin Patterson, CEO BT
“A business that makes nothing but money is a
poor kind of business.”
- Henry Ford
“We shape our environment, then our environment
shapes us.”
- Winston Churchill
“If you don't transform your company, you're
stuck.”
- Ursula Burns, CEO, Xerox
" I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't
just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the
end, an organization is nothing more than the
collective capacity of its people to create value.
Vision,
strategy,
marketing,
financial
management—any management system, in fact can
set you on the right path and can carry you for a
while. But no enterprise—whether in business,
government, education, health care, or any area of
human endeavor—will succeed over the long haul
if those elements aren't part of its DNA.”
- Louis V. Grestner
"A mantra for business transformations -Change
before you have to"
- Jack Welch
“The business model that sustained us for decades is
no longer sufficient to sustain profitability .”
- Bill Ford, email to all employees, 2006
“Abandon yesterday.”
- Peter Drucker
“In the end, management doesn’t change culture.
Management invites the workforce itself to change
the culture.”
—Lou Gerstner
“You could pretty well summarize the history of
society and the institutions in it in four words:
Nothing fails like success.
- Arnold Toynbee, great historian
“To change an organization you have to change its
stories”
- Richard Stone
“A strong culture by itself is not a guarantee of
economic success.”
- Janelle Barlow
“I did not realize the importance of culture when I
became CEO.”
- John Chambers, Cisco CEO
“When you are changing the culture, people look to
se you react when the required behaviour is not
delivered. If every time people fail your treat it as
ok, then failure becomes ok.”
- Dominique Fournier
“Your brand is your culture.”
- Tony Hsieh
“A culture of execution requires constancy and
discipline - you can’t give up.”
- Liz Mellon & Simon Carter
“To stay ahead, you must have your next idea
waiting in the wings.”
- Rosabeth Kanter
“The drive for progress doesn't wait for the external
world to say "It's time to change.”
- Jim Collins
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the
rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
- Jack Welch
“Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push
comes to shove we'll settle for intense.”
- Jeff Bezos
“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of
integrity.”
- Tom Peters
“Small groups of people can have a really huge
impact”
- Larry Page
“Money motivates neither the best people nor the
best in people. Purpose does.”
- Nilofer
“Someone's sitting in the shade today because
someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
- Warren Buffett
“It's the sustained ability to change that really
counts.”
- Jeff Immelt
“When you give everyone a voice and give people
power, the system usually ends up in a really good
place.”
- Mark Zuckerberg
"Going to work for a large company is like getting
on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is
the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just
sitting still?"
- J. Paul Getty
”When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.”
- Henry J. Kaiser
“In most organizational change efforts, it is much
easier to draw on the strengths of the culture than
to overcome the constraints by changing the
culture.”
- Edgar Schein