Quotes About Change

Transition failures happen because new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them.

do whatever it takes to get into the transition

you can decide to learn and adapt, or you can become brittle and fail.

Building "ambidextrous" organizations that can do both of these well is a challenge. See Michael L. Tushman and Charles O'Reilly III, Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal, rev. ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

If you have inherited a disaster—the classic burning platform—you may be creating value from the moment your appointment is announced.

The first task in making a successful transition is to accelerate your learning.

Decision making becomes more political—less about authority, and more about influence.

Awareness. A critical mass of people is aware of the need for change. Diagnosis. You know what needs to be changed and why. Vision. You have a compelling vision and a solid strategy. Plan. You have the expertise to put together a detailed plan. Support. You have sufficiently powerful alliances to support implementation.

They put me in the job because of my skills and accomplishments," the reasoning goes. "So that must be what they expect me to do here." This thinking is destructive, because doing what you know how to do (and avoiding what you don't) can appear to work, at least for a while. You can exist in a state of denial, believing that because you're being efficient, you're being effective. You may keep believing this until the moment the walls come crashing down around you.

As you move to higher levels, however, it becomes increasingly important to get good political counsel and personal advice. Political counselors help you understand the politics of the organization, an understanding that is especially important when you plan to implement change.

Leaders who are onboarding into new organizations must therefore focus on learning and adapting to the new culture.

preparing yourself means letting go of the past and embracing the imperatives of the new situation to give yourself a running start.

His eyes had changed color. They were no longer brown. Instead, they looked huge and golden. The eyes reminded him of a nightmare he'd had many times. In the dream, he turned into a giant black dragon. The nightmare dragon had burning yellow eyes.

If most auto accidents happen within five miles of home, why not move ten miles away?

growth covers up a lot of sins.

Real transformations of major tech companies are extremely rare: I think because companies develop a particular capability, and a set of customers, and change is hard. You can't take the stripes off a tiger. If you're born a dog, you don't die a cat.

Yet after each dramatic departure, the Earth's "equipoise" has always recovered and the climate restored to normal. As Bjornerud puts it, "Earth has had fevers and chills but has suffered no malady so extreme that its climatic immune system could not ultimately overcome it."30

JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.

The time for change is when it can no longer be resisted. In other words, when you have a man by the balls and are pulling hard, he will invariably follow in your footsteps.

When Japanese Zen monks began to marry in the nineteenth century (and almost all of them are married today), they gave up the defining practice of monasticism—celibacy, aloneness. But they refused to turn in their costumes or close their theaters. Instead, they altered the forms.

I just didn't hang around the White House any more after Nixon ... Watergate changed me a little bit along that line." - Billy Graham

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

Once established, the level of "self" rarely changes unless a person makes a structured and long-term effort to change it.

As we get older, we're all going to lose a few of our marbles.