John P. Kotter Quotes

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

Fixing culture is the most critical − and the most difficult − part of a corporate transformation… In the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

People have come to me over the years and said to me: 'I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?' I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.

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

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

In an organization that is unwilling to change, find the opportunity to talk and interact with people - figure out why they don't want to change. It could be habits. It could be people's personal equities and reputations are defined by the role they're in or the process they've mastered.

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

The challenge is always around culture. I think that's often underestimated because people focus on the substance and the practical; soft steps go missing.

Once you have a culture problem, it's very hard to fix.

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

In a change effort, culture comes last, not first.

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

I don't know the extent to which they do business [ in Wells Fargo]. I just want to see how this thing continues to unfold and if they have a legitimately major change in their culture.

Together we can change our culture for the better by ending violence against women and girls, artists have a unique power to change minds and attitudes and get us thinking and talking about what matters, and all of us, in our lives, have the power to set an example. Join our campaign to stop this violence.

The only way you can sustain a permanent change is to create a new way of thinking, acting, and being.

We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture.

Legacy leaders are the only ones wiling to pay the price to fix a broken culture.

Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."