Quotes & Sayings About Organizational Change

We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture. — John P. Kotter

Nothing so undermines organizational change as the failure to think through the losses people face. — William Bridges

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems. — Paul Gibbons

In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable. — Peter Dicken

Each time we go through a major life change (getting married or divorced, moving, having a family, switching careers, starting a new business, going back to school), we experience a breakdown of our organizational systems. It's inevitable-we are dealing with a new set of realities-and it takes time to process the information and to actually see what there is to organize. — Julie Morgenstern

It [the free market] is an organizational way of doing things, featuring openness, which enables millions of people to cooperate and compete without demanding a preliminary clearance of pedigree, nationality, color, race, religion, or wealth. It demands only that each person abide by voluntary principles, that is, by fair play. The free market means willing exchange; it is impersonal justice in the economic sphere and excludes coercion, plunder, theft, protectionism, and other anti-free market ways by which goods and services change hands. — Leonard Read

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods. — Gene Kim

Change masters are - literally - the right people in the right place at the right time. The right people are the ones with the ideas that move beyond the organization's established practice, ideas they can form into visions. The right places are the integrative environments that support innovation, encourage the building of coalitions and teams to support and implement visions. The right times are those moments in the flow of organizational history when it is possible to reconstruct reality on the basis on accumulated innovations to shape a more productive and successful future. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

It is not. The aspiring leader has been set up to fail. He just doesn't recognize it yet. The first few months go well, but reality soon sets in. It is not easy for one person to create change in a large corporation. After one year, the leader feels though he is trying to make innovation happen inside an organization that is, in every way, determined to fight his every move. — Chris Trimble

Knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the earth is not really useful if you are not planning to launch missiles to knock it out of the sky. You have to work massively overtime on the belief that innovation or massive change is going to happen.' - Tom Martin, former VP of marketing — Heather Simmons

The organizational fit is the good balance of the fitting attitude and misfit thinking. — Pearl Zhu

People often resist change for reasons that make good sense to them, even if those reasons don't correspond to organizational goals. So it is crucial to recognize, reward, and celebrate accomplishments. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I knew the kind of culture we needed to create and I defined it for the team. The seven responsibilities everyone had were to: Have fun, work hard, and enjoy the journey. Show respect for every person you have contact with in the organization. Put the team first. Successful teams have teammates that are unselfish and willing to put their individual goals behind the team's goals. Do your job. It is defined, but you must always be prepared for it to change (especially if you're a player). Appropriately handle victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation. Do not get too high in victory or too low in defeat. Be the same person every day. Understand that all organizational decisions aim to make the team better, stronger, and more efficient. Have a positive attitude. Use positive language (both verbal and body language). — Jon Gordon

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change. — Fritjof Capra

Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but also about business effectiveness, agility, innovation intelligence, and people-centricity. — Pearl Zhu

A few key terms that frame the dynamics of complexity theory will be a starting point for further study and further reflection on how complexity theory can increase our awareness of organizational dynamics and the nested systems of change that constitute life and change. — Milton Friesen

The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation. — John Seely Brown

From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the - largely unconscious - embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management. — Fritjof Capra

This isn't just a book about organizational change - it's also about — Daryl R. Conner

Organizational Development: The New Christian Right of the 1980s was dominated by paper organizations that were essentially the mailing lists of a handful of politicized ministers. Such organizations were better at issuing press releases than doing the hard work of political mobilization and advocacy. By contrast, the movement of the 1990s has generated a plethora of grass-roots organizations that allocate meaningful responsibilities to individual members. The goal is to create an army of grassroots activists who know how to stimulate political change. — Kenneth D. Wald

In most organizational change efforts, it is much easier to draw on the strengths of the culture than to overcome the constraints by changing the culture. — Edgar Schein

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow. — Ricardo Semler