You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.
Interpretation
Cultural change cannot be forced; it requires the right environment and trust for transformation to occur.
This quote by Lou Gerstner emphasizes that while management can set the stage for cultural transformation by creating conducive conditions and incentives, the actual change comes from the employees themselves. It reflects the idea that true cultural shifts are organic and rely heavily on the participation and trust of the workforce rather than being dictated by leaders.
In practice
In a company meeting about improving workplace culture, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for employee involvement.
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
One can't erase the tremendous burden of apartheid in 10 years, 20 years, I believe, even 30 years.
We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse , and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise.
After winter comes the summer. After night comes the dawn. And after every storm, there comes clear, open skies.
Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/ as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps.
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