Quotes About Change

wasn't as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.

Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization's culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change.

Irony and sarcasm, pointed jabbing criticism, personal mockery, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all of these various kinds of disrespect from the culture. Replace them with a clearly felt sense that people at all levels are to be honored for the struggle they've been willing to take on.

The person who fails is a hero, the backbone of the change effort. Failure gains that person more respect, not less.

In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

a manager who is 40 percent used up making operations happen is not viewed as 60 percent reclaimable expense. Rather, he/she is viewed as someone doing leadership 60 percent of the time. If there is an incentive to change this formula, it suggests looking for ways to decrease the time spent running operations to free up more capacity for leading the transformation.

Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change.

As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.

I just looked in to stuff to do to keep me occupied. Alright, I'm gonna start dieting. I'm gonna start working out more. So then I started to lose weight, and then I started to see some results, and I started to drop some weight.

Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.

Well, that day is gone, and it will not occur again.

States seem to have a natural life cycle, and anything can occur to change them into something else, and that something might be no bad thing.

People ask me if I am thinking of retiring. Well, it doesn't occur to me. Different day, different challenge, different way. Lovely jubbly.

Police discipline certainly does occur; it just does not often lead to change.

It never occurred to me that I could live in California. Now I can't imagine living anywhere else.

I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.

Change occurs in direct proportion to dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction never changes.

The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.

Dave played an important part in our growing, but change occurs.

Every drop in the ocean counts.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

I don't know if you can change things, but it's a drop in the ocean.

I think there's a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.

I always said that if I moved to California I'd live by the ocean.