Gary Hamel Quotes

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.

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

Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging.

Anyone in a large organization who thinks major change is impossible should probably get out.

John Akers once said that changing IBM's culture was more difficult than getting elephants to dance. Of course it's really difficult, as Lou Gerstner also found out years later. The title of his own book is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? He and his top executives were change masters at IBM. All organizations, especially the larger ones, will always need change masters. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and efforts to improve it should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Regrettably, that is often not the case.

Competence is the enemy of change!

It follows that acceleration in the rate of change will result in an increasing need for reorganization. Reorganization is usually feared, because it means disturbance of the status quo, a potential threat to peoples vested interests in their jobs, and an upset to established ways of doing things. For these reasons, needed reorganization is often deferred. With a resulting loss in effectiveness and increase in costs.

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.

An employee who's one of hundreds, rather than one of a few, is unlikely to feel personally responsible for helping the organization adapt and change.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

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

I'm impatient. Typically people think they know all about change and don't need help. Their approach tends to be more management-oriented than leadership-oriented. It's very frustrating.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

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.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.

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

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.

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

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.

There is nothing like proposals for intelligence reform to activate the anti-bodies of the affected agencies.

Senior military officers will not accept defense reform unless it is forced upon them.

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.