Carlos Ghosn Quotes

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

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.

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

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.

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.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

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

I think there are certain business matters which we must now conduct differently than we used to.

There's a lot of books out there about how you lead change in business, but I've certainly not seen any... on how you do that in public institutions.

When you're coming into a company and, you know, have to do a transformation, what you really want to do is look at the company and say, 'Okay, here are the parts that the company does well. How do we get those genes to hyper-express? The genes that are getting in the way, how do you turn those off?'

I think there's a lot of things that need to be changed in the business.

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

Kotter International is about leading large-scale change, not just managing it.

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

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

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.

You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.

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.

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.

Organizational changes to fix the problems usually create new vulnerabilities in the process of fixing the old ones.

Everybody wants change. But the problem is how you manage change.

The success, or failure, of a CEO to implement AI throughout the organization will depend on them hiring a leader to build an organization to do this. In some companies, CIOs or chief data officers are playing this role.

Culture change means we will do things differently.

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.