Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Quotes

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.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

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

How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

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

The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture

When you're trying to build or change a culture, what do you do? I always say to take players from state championship teams because they only know one thing -- winning.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

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.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

Culture does matter, but politics can change culture.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

Culture is a fluid, ongoing process. People tend to look at culture in a fixed time but it's constantly moving and evolving, as is the conversation between Americans and Cubans.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.