Bill Drayton Quotes

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

The basic DNA we've got to implant in leaders now is adaptability: not to get wedded to the solution to a particular problem, because not only the problem but the solution changes day to day. Creating people who are hardwired for that is going to be our challenge for the future.

Human nature means that institutions at some point lose their sense of mission. That sense of vulnerability drives Pimco.

Spread the gospel that the Marine Corps is a force that has changed. We're not in 1942 anymore.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

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.

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

You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.

An army that fought and won a war decisively finds it even more difficult to undergo change.

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.

Most people don't like change. They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.

It appears that PepsiCo views structural change as a sign of weakness, an admission of failure, and an untenable break with past traditions.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty. But the point is to move quickly - faster than you are comfortable - because in hindsight, you will always wish you had made changes even sooner.

We'll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We're going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that's the future of leadership.

At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we're training leaders to think across silos.

What I've looked to do is try and become a change agent for good, to create the behavioral changes, the cultural changes to really embrace urgency, adopt a higher tolerance to risk, and just encourage people to make decisions.

In the mid-'80s when the business took a big change, everybody was living their character.

We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.

The world always changes, and teams go through evolutions.

I think every team needs change every year.

Companies can change. Culture can change.

To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent

To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas.