Quotes About Culture

Here's how we do things in America: We identify a problem, then we promptly ignore it until it's not just biting our ass, but it's already eaten the right cheek and has started on the left.

All under the pretense of military application." He pouts. "No pretense about it. Remember, the Internet was a military application. And now look at how it's changed our culture.

Food for the native Ewoks.

Culture was culture, and money was money.

Have you met America?

The times we live in often dictate the type of entertainment we seek -- and we're starting to slide once more into a very dark and scary corner of American life.

What is sweeter than lettered ease?

Speaking Latin properly is indeed to be held in the highest regard – not just because of its own merits, but in fact because it has been neglected by the masses. For it is not so much Noble to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.

1894, George Saintsbury was confident that "a fondness for Miss Austen" could be considered "itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity.

How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?

brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton

Three classes of factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values.

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. Those

As MIT's Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce "this is what matters most to us." Processes are intangible; they belong

As MIT's Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce "this is what matters most to us.

Walkman cassette player was temporarily put on hold when market research indicated that consumers would never buy a tape player that didn't have the capacity to record and that customers would be irritated by the use of earphones. But Morita ignored his marketing department's warning, trusting his own gut instead. The Walkman went on to sell over 330 million units and created a worldwide culture of personal music devices.

Make no mistake: a culture happens, whether you want it to or not. The only question is how hard you are going to try to influence it.

When the organization's capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values, and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can be extraordinarily difficult.

It's no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they're a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT's Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce "this is what matters most to us.

Kate had thought hula was something for tourists, girls in plastic skirts dancing to will songs about tiny bubbles in the champagne. Mehana's hula was different-a way of telling stories without words, a kimd of body poetry.

Land meant something different in Hawai'i then it did in California. People here said the word with a kind of worship in their voices.

They took our land, then they took our water. But Hawaiians lost more then that. The haole took away our pride. They called us 'natives'. They told us our language was no good, that our gods were evil.

And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people's minds.

The first question, of course, is whether there ever was such a creature as Man. At the moment, in the absence of positive evidence, the sober consensus must be that there was not, that Man, as presented in the legend, is a figment of folklore invention. Man may have risen in the early days of Doggish culture as an imaginary being, a sort of racial god, on which the Dogs might call for help, to which they might retire for comfort.