Jennifer Hyman Quotes

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

Too many people who come in as CEO of a poorly performing company assume that none of the incumbent executives are worth retaining. That's not always the case. Sometimes the talent is there, but it's not being led well.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

All companies of any size have to continue to push to make sure you get the right leaders, the right team, the right people to be fast acting, and fast moving in the marketplace. We've got great leaders, and we continue to attract and promote great new leaders.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

I think there's a lot of things that need to be changed in the business.

KIND had grown from a team of dedicated, overworked generalists to a large, professional organization with specialists who had either come in from outside or had been groomed internally to grow in a focused area about which they're passionate.

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

The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.

Very often, we think of leadership being at the very top of an organisation. I think what's unique about ABG is that we have a very strong cadre of leaders across the organisation who are highly empowered and therefore play a very major role in the growth and evolution of the organization.

I think one of the main challenges that the World Bank faces is creating an organizational structure that doesn't get in the way of its staff. We have fantastic staff. People told me as I was coming into the organization that the greatest asset of the World Bank Group is its staff, and I think there's no question that that's the case.

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

You don't implement change easily in Japan unless you explain very clearly why you need to do this change, how you're going to do this change and what's going to be the outcome of this change. If you offset or you forget to explain one of these three steps you're not going to do it.

People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.

So in one leap we had gone from being a friendly society to something almost professional.

Multiple mergers can be challenging because people come from different backgrounds.

If longevity is the best index to measure a company, a basic requirement is the ability of the corporation to generate new and new leaders.

Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, in the next century we are going to have to try to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

There's always, I guess, a philosophy that if you come in, you want to change all the parts, you want to change everything over. I've always tried to preach that consistency and continuity are very, very important. So if I know the baseball people, and I know they're competent and could do the job, I don't see any reason to replace them.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.

The Leadership Training Institute of America is a cultural think tank providing training and opportunity in leadership development and cultural dynamics.

At IBM, if we kept our same leadership for 36 years, we'd be bankrupt.

Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on.

I've trained my people in mentoring entrepreneurs and made myself obsolete.