Richard K. Betts Quotes

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

Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.

There was a point in time when I was in dire need of changing the way the model agency was working.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.

While one has to work from the roots upwards to build a solid organization, at the start one has no choice but to work from the top downwards, since until individuals had learnt to think for themselves, masses could be manipulated.

The last thing we need to do now is reorganize and create a new department.

Organization cannot make a genius out of a dunce.

It is axiomatic in politics that the earlier one addresses a problem, the more the alternatives and the easier the solutions.

I do not believe that reorganization will fix what is wrong with our intelligence community….Failures were caused by performance, not organization.

Are our problems moving faster than our ability to solve them?

Good organization does not necessarily mean it will produce good policy. But bad organization will almost never produce good policy.

Redesigning a strategy is an excellent way to avoid implementing the strategy.

You can't delegate turning a company around.

I'm committed to structural changes.

If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask. Change it. Think about dollars, think about your soldiers' time, think about efficiency.

I am good at conceptualizing and building institutions.

Harman had great brands, but the processes were falling apart.

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

Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

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.

The good thing about execution issues are that they are within our control.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

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.

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.