Tom Shadyac Quotes

Competent people are the most resistant to change

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.

Inertia is a powerful force in human and political affairs.

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.

What I think we fear is rapid, pronounced, and uncontrollable changes to ourselves, and because of this we have a form of personality inertia - something that resists rapid change.

When you have a model that's worked very well, it's very hard to change.

When push comes to shove, the status quo is a very powerful force.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

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

The establishment can't change. It can't give people anything different; it can't make the turn.

I realised how much the system did not want to change.

As David Cameron realizes, we do not have time for the tweaks and increments favored by institutions built to resist change.

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 an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.

In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

The bureaucracies that are in place now, they're not going to change, they're not going to stop.

Established systems are inherently hostile to change.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

Competence is the enemy of change!

The largest enemy of change isn't 'no', it's 'not yet' - that is the easiest way to forestall change.

Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics.

The status quo is persistent and resistant. It exists because everyone wants it to. Everyone believes that what they've got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.