Quotes About Culture

Purpose isn't about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we'll call high-purpose environments.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other.

In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present-day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known.

If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?)

Skunking is spraying negative energy into the workplace, as skunks do when they're frightened.

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built.

Eliminate Bad Apples:

This place is like a greenhouse," Hsieh says. "In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that's not me. I'm not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.

Successful groups are attuned to the same truth as the starlings: Purpose isn't about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we'll call high-purpose environments.

He's very smart, but the smartest thing about him is that he thinks sort of like an eight-year-old," says Jeanne Markel, director of culture for the Downtown Project. "He keeps things really simple and positive when it comes to people.

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It's not something you are. It's something you do.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I wish I was in de land ob cotton,Old times dar am not forgotten.Look away, look away,Look away, Dixie Land.

I am currently learning how to work the blasted technology of this infuriating dominant culture. If this was the neolithic i'd still be all boss!

The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant," Albert Einstein once said. "We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leached into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives.

You must understand video games. Seriously.

Campbell argued that all myths—across time and across cultures—contain the same basic ingredients and follow the same general recipe. There are never any new stories, he said—just the same stories retold.

As a society, I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard, because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.