Rosabeth Moss Kanter Quotes

Managers don't have as much leverage as they used to have. We can't really be the boss.

I think Tesla doesn't sound like it has a very collaborative culture.

As for whether I am a 'new age guru', I am not at all. I help companies build employees who lead without a title and become high performers.

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

Building human-centered organizations doesn't imply a return to the paternalistic, corporate welfare practices of the 19th century. Most of us don't want to be nannied.

Many Chinese companies are run like military camps with military discipline. We do not run a company that way. It does not help the creative process.

If tomorrow all of America were to become paternalistic, we would beat the Japanese every day of the week. I think that the concept of accusing someone of running a paternalistic company, that's not an accusation. One should compliment someone on that.

Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse.

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.

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

We find that when we make an acquisition, or we have a hiring experience, that's one of the hardest things to change. If you've been working for a company where you didn't dare challenge your boss, or what's politically correct in the company, then it affects your career.

Old-style management is irrelevant.

I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.

Since most startups operate at a break-neck pace, with a concept to prove or a product to launch within a rapidly shortening runway of financing, company culture often gets shoved aside. This is a big, big mistake: Nobody serious about their business should put culture in the corner.

We have a training period; we have certain guidelines and structure. You can't hire talented people and stifle them. That's not the way it works anymore.

As an HR Manager, you don't have to build a top-down perks program. You decide how much you want to invest in your employees, and then you give your employees the control to build a custom perk package for themselves.

The way I would measure leadership is this: of the people that are working with me, how many wake up in the morning thinking that the company is theirs?

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

This obsession with leadership... It's not neutral; it's American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it's killing American companies.

The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.

For me, this is a familiar image - people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions.

Most people in an organization try very hard to do what the leadership wants them to do. That places a tremendous responsibility on leaders.

Microsoft's culture is very strong.

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

About every other week, I sit down with all of our new Zynga hires and I talk to them for about 90 minutes, have an open Q&A. There is no formal presentation. I talk about our values, where they came from and why they are so important, and I ask them to challenge those values.