Quotes About Change

And the stars look very different today.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.

Tomorrow belongs to those who hear it coming.

Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key. "But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass away and others take their place, as has happened before. An ecosystem frozen in stone can only become a fossil.

Look. Studies show FEAR sets attitudes/tolerance to change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange. Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of Dreams.

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations.

And yet we've flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children's children talk about tapping energy from pulsars.

There isn't one America anymore. If there ever had been.

Why is the future always Ã¢â'¬Â¦ in the future?

Psychology often presents individuals as if they are frozen in time and space, describing their score on an intelligence or personality test, how they remember or what their inner conflicts are. All imply that people are fixed and that a description of them at one point in time will inevitably be true of them at another.

The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.

As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

In driving for cultural change, it's a mistake to become overly constrained by your desired culture as you've defined it. Are there any other, related behaviors, values, or principles that support high performance than the ones you've formally adopted? If so, don't hesitate to push these as well.

When institutionalizing the culture, don't just graft it blithely onto existing processes or practices. Go deeper and question whether those processes or practices themselves need improvement.

Just as you're pushing for more efficiency throughout the organization via process change, you can also keep your organization increasingly slender and nimble as you grow by maintaining a leadership corps that is relatively small and stable but that punches far above its weight.

Today, almost half of our engineers company-wide are developing software—a massive change from years past.

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

Entropy is the rule in organizations, as it is in the physical universe. Over time, all organized systems evolve toward chaos. Unless you pursue change relentlessly, your efforts will eventually wither away.

we made a practice of publicizing internally the top ten and bottom ten performers on HOS. Leaders and teams liked placing in the top ten, but they absolutely detested being publicly identified as a bottom-ten performer. This tactic helped generate a sense of urgency around HOS, raising performance across the entire organization. In fact, I recommend using this tactic whenever you're trying to change anything in an organization.

When both introducing and sustaining change, leadership matters. The organization needs to see that you, personally, are taking this seriously. As we rolled out HOS, I talked about its importance for our business at every opportunity. I held regular meetings to make sure we were actually implementing it and that we were getting the results—something I didn't do for Six Sigma, and a reason it underdelivered.

Understand the significance of mind-set and culture. If the mind-set doesn't change, operations won't change either. In particular, be sure to get people past the mentality of "I have to do my job and this too?

An organization that is adept at constantly evolving usually won't need to take enormous risks to bring about revolutionary change, because it'll have been changing all along.