Jed Mercurio Quotes

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

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can't make him think.

For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism.

Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.

Let me control personnel, and I will ultimately control policy.

The most important rule of bureaucracy is never be wrong and alone.

Rules about what you can and can’t say often have unintended consequences. … In everything we do, we need to make sure we’re empowering people, not simply reinforcing existing institutions and power structures.

Culture is more important than rules and regulations.

The frustration of being ordered around by somebody to do something - everyone can relate to that. I think Beetle represents that - the common man caught in that morass of rules and regulations. I don't even think of it as an army strip... it's a world anyone can understand.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

I understand that bureaucracy, hierarchy and managing politics is not easy.

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.

People.. especially people in positions of power.. have invested a tremendous amount of effort and time to get to where they are. They really don't want to hear that we're on the wrong path, that we've got to shift gears and start thinking differently.

Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Work is pushing matter around. Politics is pushing people around.

An army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions.

All of us are subjected to somebody else's power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit.

The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state

Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.

The one who decides who goes ahead has the upper hand, regardless of who gets to go. This is why many women do not feel empowered by such privileges as having doors held open for them. The advantage of going first through the door is less salient to them than the disadvantage of being granted the right to walk through a door by someone who is framed, by his magnanimous gesture, as the arbiter of the right-of-way.

The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.