You get few chances to make really transformational institutional change.
By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.
[The NBA] used to be a small band of basketball groupies. Now there are a lot more corporate-type people working in the league.
Any time you have a change of leadership in an organization, everything kind of shifts.
And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization“. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.
I think one of the major themes in 'Escape Fire,' really, if you break it down, is that huge institutions, the military, the Safeway Corporation and others, are being forced to change.
Companies used to be able to function with autocratic bosses. We don't live in that world anymore.
The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.
The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.
It's normal to have early difficulties when you get a new manager with a new concept.
There are no managers like there used to be managers.
Now, we don't get rid of it in round one because we don't think that that's politically smart, and we don't think that's the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it's going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it - voluntarily.
A long way of saying I've seen a lot of kind of more systemic and processed changes. Although we still are providing the kind of material you're still seeing out there now.
All white-collar work is project work. The single salient fact that touches all of our lives is that work is being reinvented.
Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Whether you like it or not. It's bottom-up; it's impossible.
If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.
