Quotes About Culture

The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!" The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language.

Yepsen (n.) The amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; also, the two cupped hands themselves. A measurement that has never really caught on like the teaspoon, the yepsen also falls firmly within the category of things for which you never thought there was a word—at least, not until some interfering busybody like me came along and told you what it was. Yesterneve

Cities with all their advantages have something hostile to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and accost the senses so openly on all sides.

When a man's own culture falls behind that of his time, he is conservative. When it outstrips and enables him to over-see his time, he is a reformer.

The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.

We even recommended the creation of a recurring IC Analytic Olympics to send home the message that fostering a culture of continuous evaluation and learning should be championed.113

Low levels of psychological safety can create a culture of silence. They can also create a Cassandra culture – an environment in which speaking up is belittled and warnings go unheeded.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept "no" or "it can't be done" for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.

In one study investigating employee experiences with speaking up, 85% of respondents reported at least one occasion when they felt unable to raise a concern with their bosses, even though they believed the issue was important.

failure of an employee to speak up in a crucial moment cannot be seen. This is true whether that employee is on the front lines of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive board room. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.

Conflict, in the Bridgewater culture, is conducted in the service of finding "what is true and what to do about it.

Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.

The good teams, I suddenly thought, don't make more mistakes; they report more.

A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.

What we can learn from this extreme case, as well as from many cases of normal business conversation, is that psychological safety must be paired with discipline to achieve optimal results efficiently.

When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups

unless a leader expressly and actively makes it psychologically safe to do so, people will automatically seek to avoid failure. So how did Teller reframe failure to make it okay? By saying, believing, and convincing others that "I'm not pro failure, I'm pro learning.

When Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, first came on board in August 2017, one of his priorities was to meet with women engineers. Alert to the damage done to the company's culture, he began by laying the groundwork for a psychologically safe workplace. As Jessica Bryndza, Uber's Global Director of People Experience, commented, "He [Khosrowshahi] didn't come in guns blazing. He came in listening."58 The operative word here is "listening.

For speaking up to become routine, psychological safety – and expectations about speaking up – must become institutionalized and systematized.

Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. This

America's elites today, especially progressive ones, often don't realize how judgmental they are.