Organizational Resilience Quotes

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it's Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.

So it takes years to make a solid company.

A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest.

You have to make your company idiot-proof because you may have an idiot running it some day.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.

Go for a business that any idiot can run - because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it.

Trouble results when the speed of growth exceeds the speed of nurturing human resources. To use the analogy of growth rings in a tree, when unusually rapid growth caused the rings to grow abnormally thick, the tree trunk weakens and is easily broken.

I do not think I will die, but whether I do or not, the company will pursue the same policies.

The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

Organizational health is the single greatest competitive advantage in any business.

Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.

Practically every enterprise is threatened and put on the defensive as soon as it comes into existence.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

I mean, some people say, 'Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.' And, you know, I think it wouldn't be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do.

Anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

A leader who accepts the outside financing of his movement is like the man who accustoms his body to live on medication. To the extent an organism is administered medication, to the same extent it is condemned to being unable to react on its own. Moreover, when it is deprived of the medication, it dies; it is at the mercy of the pharmacist! Likewise, a political movement is at the mercy of those who finance it. These could cease their financing at any given moment and the movement, unaccustomed to living on its own, dies.

People are mad about our policies, They’re not necessarily mad at us.

Unlike people, companies outlive their founders and their leaders.

Never accept or be too comfortable with the status quo, because the companies that get into trouble are historically the ones that aren't able to adapt to change and respond quickly enough.

Well-trained and dedicated employees are the only sustainable source of competitive strength.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.