Tim O'Reilly Quotes

The reform of government needs to continue.

How much reform do you think this institution [Congress] can take?

I ran for president in order to be able to try to change Washington D.C. from the inside. Our federal government is broken.

I have changed the style of functioning of the government and administration and managed to change the perception.

In government change is suspected.

Old, deeply engrained systems take time to change, but we can't leave it to time.

Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.

Managers are trained to make incremental, programmatic improvements. They aren't trained to lead large-scale change.

I shall work with Congress, civil society groups and local government executives who are convinced that charter changes are needed to enable the country to surmount the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.

I think it true that, you know, sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and, actually, I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes, that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

Now, a lot of people have given up on government. And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing.

I don't need to be looking at every failure of government, I need to be looking where failure of government needs reform.

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.

I know how bad Albany is. I know it better than most. I understand why people are angry. I'm angry. The question is going to be, how do you change Albany, what is the plan for change, and then how do you actually get it done?

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.

The next adventure is the government, a government of change.

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

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

Are we going to just change the personalities in the speakership? Or are we going to fundamentally transform the way we do business here in Washington, D.C.?