Eric Yuan Quotes

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 can overcome wrong technology. Your people have the initiative, they see the problem, no big deal ... you can't overcome bad culture. You've gotta change whoever is in charge.

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.

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

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

The first step in changing a culture, I believe, starts with the senior leadership team - and with the CEO.

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.

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

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.

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

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

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.

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 my experience, it is the leader - the CEO - who plays the crucial role in creating and 'owning' an organization's culture, setting the tone, and executing on that consistently.

The cultural issues, I think, at Wells Fargo went very, very deep. They have to unwind these cultural issues.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

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

When a culture is broken, the cracks show - morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That's why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.

Purpose is not an add-on, it’s not an initiative. It is a culture change and it never finishes

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.

This call for a new culture is not a new idea.

I'm trying to change the culture in New York City; that's hard enough!

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

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

It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change.