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.
Vision is easy. It's so easy to just point to the bleachers and say I'm going to hit one over there. What's hard is saying, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work.
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world. Successful enterprises are built from the ground up.
Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.
By healing the internal issues that we can heal as a people, our children don't have to suffer the same agony and pain that we put each other through.
We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!
I'm not going to change the world overnight. It's one person at a time, and hopefully they're people in positions of power who can help people get in those roles and really, truly embrace colorblind casting.
And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.
I would like to see evolution in my country, not revolution. It is much better for us to work together with the government to transform Saudi Arabia for the future.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.