Organizational Culture Quotes

Organizational culture is just like the "Operation System" of the organization, you need reboot periodically to keep it running smoothly. ~ Pearl Zhu

The rich flow of creativity, innovation, and almost musical complexity we are looking for in a fulfilled work life cannot be reached through trying or working harder. The medium for the soul, it seems, must be the message. The river down which we raft is made up of the same substance as the great sea of our destination. It is an ever-moving, firsthand creative engagement with life and with others that completes itself simply by being itself. This kind of approach must be seen as the "great art" of working in order to live, of remembering what is most important in the order of priorities and what place we occupy in a much greater story than the one our job description defines. Other "great arts," such as poetry, can remind and embolden us to this end. Whatever we choose to do, the stakes are very high. With a little more care, a little more courage, and, above all, a little more soul, our lives can be so easily discovered and celebrated in work, and not, as now, squandered and lost in its shadow. ~ David Whyte

We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture. ~ John P. Kotter

Authentic leaders inspire us to engage with each other in powerful dreams that make the impossible possible. We are called on to persevere despite failure and pursue a purpose beyond the paycheck. This is at the core of innovation. It requires aligning the dreams of each individual to the broader dream of the organization. ~ Henna Inam

Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives. ~ Matthew Syed

In an organizational culture where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest values, shame and blame don't work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy is a valued asset, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can't control the behavior of individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where behaviors are not tolerated and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings. We ~ Brene Brown

With Lean Six Sigma, the tools are the easy part, changing organizational culture is the hard part. ~ John Novak

Engaging in social business is beneficial to a company because it leverages on business competencies to address social issues, involves one-time investment with sustainable results, and produces other positive effects such as employee motivation and improved organizational culture. ~ Muhammad Yunus

The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organisational change management process that meets two key objectives, one being the company culture, and the other one is empowering its employees ~ Enamul Haque

Every conflict must produce a win-win outcome and must never be resolved through a compromise, which makes both sides suffer in some way. Even forcing one side to do what the other side wants is better than a compromise. ~ Yegor Bugayenko

By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful. ~ Marcia Conner

I don't really like organizations where people are "deemed" things. ~ Mindy Kaling

If you're trying to predict human economic behavior - and you don't include emotions in your
equation - your predictions will probably be way off. Emotions factor heavily into the algorithms that
produce our trade-off decisions. ~ Tanya Mann

Great leaders create great cultures regardless of the dominant culture in the organization. ~ Bob Anderson

Bureaucratic categories and organizational boxes do more than simply separate relevant from irrelevant information. They also produce the social optics that policymakers and bureaucrats use to see the world. Before policymakers can act, they first must come to create a definition and understanding of the situation, and that understanding is mediated by how the institution is organized to think. ...How organizations categorize and carve up the world has a profound impact on how policymakers see the world. ~ Michael Barnett

Abolishing hierarchies thus means that people would not have set roles or tasks, but rather that these are in line with their skills and the necessary performance at a given time ~ Miguel Reynolds Brandao

No culture that has ever embraced homosexuality has survived. ~ Steve Largent

But people are not butterflies, right.
People are, well, more important than butterflies.
We have opposable thumbs, hello.
You can't possibly compare the sanctity of a human's life with that of a butterfly. In our culture you can and, indeed, must quantify sanctity, and butterflies have less than people. ~ Inga Muscio

Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness. ~ Robert Bly

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want. ~ Clive Barnes

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. ~ Marcel Proust

Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. ~ A.S. Byatt

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artis ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture, and is in itself ennobling. ~ Henry Taube

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes. ~ Hellmut Wilhelm

I foresee death by culture shock. ~ Woody Allen

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. ~ Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Without a thorough and deeply rooted understanding of the biblical view of truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, eternally engaging, antithetical and exclusive, unified and systematic, and as an end in itself, the Christian response to postmodernism will be muted by the surrounding culture or will make illicit compromises with the truth-impoverished spirit of the age. The good news is that truth is still truth, that it provides a backbone for witness and ministry in postmodern times, and that God's truth will never fail. ~ Douglas Groothuis

Living in different cultures helped me work out who I was going to be, separate from where I came from. ~ Jacinda Barrett

I think my Latino culture has equipped me with a different point of view than the rest of my counterparts, and seeing things from a different angle has helped me a lot. I feel very proud of my culture, of my Latino heritage. ~ Nina Garcia

It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world. ~ Annalee Newitz

And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons. ~ Andrew Solomon

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page. ~ Kiese Laymon

Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce. ~ Steven Pressfield

None seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling. ~ Maggie Nelson

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. ~ Jerry Garcia

For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy. ~ Carl Sagan

For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls
even if you'd once been best friends
was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one's own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets? ~ Meg Wolitzer

There are so many women throughout the world who appreciate beautiful design and have the budget to buy designer fashion but sometimes have a hard time finding the things that they really want or that suit their lifestyle or their culture or whatever it may be. ~ Aslaug Magnusdottir

The world does not need a war against 'terrorism', it needs a culture of peace based on human rights for all. ~ Irene Khan

Movies are such an integral part of American culture. We're so spread out in this country, and movies offer us a chance to come together and have a communal experience. ~ David Call

We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid ... We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made. ~ H.G.Wells

Hopefully we'll get to a point where people realize movies don't cause violence. It just reflects the violence going on in the culture. ~ Eli Roth