Institutional Memory Quotes

Every president is a product of those who preceded him.

One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing.

Stability means respecting precedents.

For most career bureaucrats, the most important reference points are other career officials; they are bureaucratic loyalists rather than Presidential loyalists.

One of the enduring truths of the nation's capital is that bureaucrats survive.

If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

Institutions do live on their history.

While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father's time.

In Afghanistan, the viceroy approach would reduce rampant fraud by focusing spending on initiatives that further the central strategy, rather than handing cash to every outstretched hand from a U.S. system bereft of institutional memory.

[Dan Fried ]is a pillar of the U.S. State Department. He's part of its institutional memory. He has been in the room for basically every important negotiation, every standoff, every big development, particularly between the United States and Russia for decades.

Every institution is perfectly capable of forgetting what it has learned in three years.

One of the biggest challenges for any new administration is contending with its predecessor's priorities and beginning to advance its own.

I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

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

If you're lucky enough to have a permanent position, don't feel entitled. Companies value longtime employees' institutional memory, but to be irreplaceable, you must stay invested. Take the initiative and assume new responsibilities.

If you've worked in a company for a long time, there's a mythology that you know by heart, you don't need to look it up to evoke. It's there in your blood, as it were.

An institution is beyond any individual. It breathes and lives on its own and always will.

Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.

I think the legacy was set because the way George Mitchell was the leader enabled Tom Daschle to be the leader he is. It carried on the spirit of integrity and of reform, of also working both with committee chairmen but bringing in the newer members to be able to have a voice and a say and participate in the deliberations, to always look at a modern way of doing it.

You never replace a great scholar who retires. If you try to do that, you end up with burnt-out volcanoes.

At a massive club like Liverpool, people will come and go. It is our job to keep the wheels moving and momentum going.

I believe it is important for the university to always remember its roots.

Institutional memory is important in any organization, but so are fresh ideas.