Marcus Buckingham 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.

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.

When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.

In my career, there have been many things I am fortunate enough to be proud of. Yet one of the things I feel most strongly about is the culture we created during the ten years I was at Aetna, and its enduring impact.

Culture used to be viewed as the 'touchy-feely' side of business, but that's no longer the case. If you don't have a defined culture behind you, then you aren't going to be effective at executing your strategy.

When a culture is broken, the cracks show - morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That's why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

The future of any corporation is as good as the value system of the leaders and followers in the organization.

A sour corporate culture can actually make an entire society unhappy. This means that a strong corporate culture can have a positive impact on a society.

Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won't make a company successful.

Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.

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

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

Microsoft's culture is very strong.

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

Our culture is the foundation for our company.

Ultimately, what any company does when it is successful is merely a lagging indicator of its existing culture.

In my experience, it is the leader - the CEO - who plays the crucial role in creating and 'owning' an organization's culture, setting the tone, and executing on that consistently.

As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.

The culture or environment of a company starts from the top. The leadership. The leadership of a company sends a message to its employees of what is tolerated and what is not.

I am deeply honored by the trust the board has placed in me to lead Duke Energy. I have a high degree of confidence in the strength of our company's leadership and dedicated employees.

Once you have a culture problem, it's very hard to fix.

No one gave me a recipe for how to create company culture. I wish I had had one.

A positive, high-performance culture can quickly turn negative if the CEO is not rigorous in constantly articulating values and holding people accountable for both results and values.

Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relations with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first-line attention. In this regard we could learn much from the Japanese. We must reinvest in the human side of management.