Neal Patterson Quotes

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

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people.

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

I have a theory that you can tell what the head of a company is like by the people who work there. I knew a publishing house that was run on fear and paranoia, and I felt sorry for everyone who worked there. Needless to say, the person at the helm was not known for kindness, warmth, or grace.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

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.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

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

The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

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.

I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.

If people think the boss is manipulating them to get them to work harder, it backfires.

I think Amazon is a place where people don't want to work.

Command-and-control isn't the kind of corporate culture people want to be in anymore.

I think, in any workplace environment, the atmosphere trickles down from the top.

We need better corporate environments. We need better workplaces everywhere.

Unfortunately, as you hire more people, the casual, informal 'do what it takes' culture, which worked so well at less than 40 people, becomes chaotic and less effective.

Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging.

On 'Downsizing,' I had a trailer, and I got to bring my dog to work, and I thought, 'I've made it: I'm bringing my dog to work.'

Imagine going into an office and telling the staff that they have to follow your philosophy. Imagine the reaction you would get if you said that in any other walk of life. Why would I offer that to my players?

The number one way to get trust back is to pay your employees well and get them to speak well about the company.

Anyone in a large organization who thinks major change is impossible should probably get out.

John Akers once said that changing IBM's culture was more difficult than getting elephants to dance. Of course it's really difficult, as Lou Gerstner also found out years later. The title of his own book is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? He and his top executives were change masters at IBM. All organizations, especially the larger ones, will always need change masters. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and efforts to improve it should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Regrettably, that is often not the case.

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