Quotes About Culture

The point is not what core values you have, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organization, and that you preserve them over time.

Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace ... [but] eighty percent of our success is in the culture of our company."24 Indeed

Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.

Bureaucratic cultures arise to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which arise from having the wrong people on the bus in the first place.

Don't underestimate the extent to which your actions influence those who work for you. Manners of speech, decision-making style, ways of behaving, and other attributes will rub off.

Such is the nature of how people respond to authority figures. Inevitably, people will begin to emulate you. Even if you have a non-hierarchical environment, you'll still be perceived as an authority figure, and people will respond to you as such. Therefore, you've got to be a role model of the culture you want to create.

When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

A culture of discipline involves a duality. On the one hand, it requires people who adhere to a consistent system; yet, on the other hand, it gives people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system.

When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology

Core ideology provides the glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and develops workplace diversity. Think of it as analogous to the principles of Judaism that held the Jewish people together for centuries without a homeland, even as they spread throughout the Diaspora.

We live in a world rich in success but impoverished in meaning. A life of relentless work without meaning is brutal and dark. Most of us will never have the depth of love in our daily work that Manchester had with his fellow Marines. But we can move closer to it by building a culture where people depend on people. And in so doing, you will give people something of immeasurable value—work that matters. And that is truly great.

It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place.

If you want to scale your culture, if you want to make the journey from great company to enduring great company, you must invest in building a pipeline of the right unit leaders.

Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard.

Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as "on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .

The main point is to first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The

Washington cultivated a culture of open dialogue, practicing his famous self-discipline of silence, encouraging arguments to compete, listening and probing, until he made up his mind to act.

Leading as a charismatic visionary—a "genius with a thousand helpers" upon whom everything depends—is time telling. Shaping a culture that can thrive far beyond any single leader is clock building.

If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated.

Whereas the good-to-great companies had Level 5 leaders who built an enduring culture of discipline, the unsustained comparisons had Level 4 leaders who personally disciplined the organization through sheer force.

I barbari non sono in sostanza una categoria culturale ma politica, che designa una popolazione non (ancora?) amministrata dallo stato. I barbari cominciano dove finiscono le tasse e i cereali.

il surplus non esiste fino a che non viene creato dallo stato in embrione. Detto meglio, prima che lo stato riuscisse ad appropriarsi del surplus produttivo, questo veniva «usato» per avere tempo libero dal lavoro e per l'elaborazione culturale.

Pope Francis routinely expresses his shame and sorrow, but he instinctively defends the accused; he denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its hospitable niche, but he does nothing to dismantle it. Indeed, in his instinctive protective responses to the corruption of clericalism, he embodies that culture, even while seeming to criticize it.