Eric Shinseki Quotes

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

It appears that PepsiCo views structural change as a sign of weakness, an admission of failure, and an untenable break with past traditions.

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

So in one leap we had gone from being a friendly society to something almost professional.

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

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

I'm impatient. Typically people think they know all about change and don't need help. Their approach tends to be more management-oriented than leadership-oriented. It's very frustrating.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

Historically speaking, institutions are slow to change and usually resistant to any sudden moves - churches especially so.

The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

The Korean War has also show quite clearly that in a major conflict manpower is as important as horsepower.

Most people don't like change. They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.

As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

Culture change means we will do things differently.

I'm committed to structural changes.

Companies can change. Culture can change.

Too often, companies focus on systems and structures that facilitate cultural change at the mid-management level, overlooking problems closer to the top.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.