John P. Kotter Quotes

This call for a new culture is not a new idea.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

In a change effort, culture comes last, not first.

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.

To reform the Secret Service, the agency needs a director from outside the agency who will be immune from that culture and not beholden to entrenched bureaucrats within the agency.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

If we don't change our culture, the politics is going to migrate more and more to statism.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

The Chinese move very slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.

The first step in changing a culture, I believe, starts with the senior leadership team - and with the CEO.

What I've looked to do is try and become a change agent for good, to create the behavioral changes, the cultural changes to really embrace urgency, adopt a higher tolerance to risk, and just encourage people to make decisions.

If you really want to change a culture... empower women.

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

The only way to remain great is to keep on applying the fundamental principles that made you great.

It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie.

I'm not silly enough to think I'm going to change the whole culture ... but I do have a belief that soccer can go to a different level.

When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

Fixing culture is the most critical − and the most difficult − part of a corporate transformation… In the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

I don't know the extent to which they do business [ in Wells Fargo]. I just want to see how this thing continues to unfold and if they have a legitimately major change in their culture.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.

The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture