"Culture itself is neither education nor lawmaking: it is an atmosphere and a heritage." (Henry L Mencken, "Minority Report", 1956)
"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media works as environments." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)
"Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others." (Geert Hofstede, "Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values", 1980)
"Someone adhering to the values of a corporate culture - an intelligent corporate citizen - will behave in consistent fashion under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer the inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations. […] management has to develop and nurture the common set of values, objectives, and methods essential to the existence of trust. How do we do that? One way is by articulation, by spelling [them] out. […] The other even more important way is by example."
"Strong corporate cultures, like strong family cultures, come from within, and they are built by individual leaders, not consultants." (Craig R. Hickman & Michael A. Silva, "Creating Excellence", 1984)
"The achievement of excellence can occur only if the organization promotes a culture of creative dissatisfaction." (Lawrence M Miller, "American Spirit", 1984)
"[...] an examination of cultural issues at the organizational level is absolutely essential to a basic understanding of what goes on in organizations, how to run them, and how to improve them." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)
"Culture [is] a pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)
"Organizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and - if and when that may become necessary - the destruction of culture." (Edgar Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)
"The inherent conflict between managers and professionals results basically from a clash of cultures: the corporate culture, which captures the commitment of managers, and the professional culture, which socializes professionals." (Joseph A Raelin, Harvard Business School, 1986)
"A strong corporate culture is the invisible hand that guides how things are done in an organization. The phrase, 'You just can't do that here', is extremely powerful, more so than any written rules or policy manuals." (Andrew S Grove, "One-On-One With Andy Grove", 1987)
"A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least." (Jacques Barzun, "The Culture We Deserve", 1989)
"Even revolutionaries conserve; all cultures are conservative. This is so because it is a systemic phenomenon: all systems exist only as long as there is conservation of that which defines them." (Humberto M Romesin & Pille Bunnell, "Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: What has that to do with Business? Society for Organizational Learning", 1998)
"Strategy maps show the cause-and effect links by which specific improvements create desired outcomes [...] From a larger perspective, strategy maps show how an organization will convert its initiatives and resources - including intangible assets such as corporate culture and employee knowledge - into tangible outcomes." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)
"Getting project management to work in an organization requires a change in culture." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)
"The word culture designates the sum total of the values, attitudes, traditions, and behaviors that exist in an organization." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)
"You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe." (Steve Jobs, Newsweek, 2004)
"Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness [...] the three-way coevolution of physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs…accounts for the patterns of change and growth we see in the economy." (Eric D Beinhocker, "The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics", 2006)
"Whilst culture can help create a sense of belonging and shared destiny, it can also prove to be an obstacle to change especially where the existing culture is risk averse or if the change strategy is perceived by some to challenge prevailing group values. Where radical change is proposed, the achievement of cultural change may actually be a major objective of the proposed change." (Roger Jones & Neil Murra, "Change, Strategy and Projects at Work", 2008)
"A blame culture is corrosive, eroding the team ethos that is vital for success. If they fear that they will be pilloried or punished for their mistakes, your colleagues will start worrying more about how to protect their back than doing what’s best for the team and wider organization. In the worst cases, this can even lead to lying, setting up fall guys, and other dysfunctional behavior." (Paul Butcher, "Debug It! Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code", 2009)
"A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)
"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012)
"The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people." (John Kotter, "The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations", 2012)
"Culture is fuzzy, easy to caricature, amenable to oversimplifications, and often used as a catchall when all other explanations fail." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)
"Truly human leadership protects an organization from the internal rivalries that can shatter a culture. When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result." (Simon Sinek, "Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't", 2014)
"All cultures organize themselves around a story, which tells them how the world came into being - a creation myth." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)
"[…] culture cannot be changed directly. It changes as a result of changes to organizational beliefs and rituals." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015
"Culture is an emergent phenomenon produced by structures,
practices, leadership behavior, incentives, symbols, rituals, and processes.
All those levers have to be pulled to have any chance of success. However, one
driver of culture change is more important than the others. Culture change
fails when the most visible symbols of it fail to change. Those key symbols are
almost always the top leader’s behavior, which speaks much louder than
anything they might say." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful
Organizational Change", 2015)
"DevOps recognizes the importance of culture. The acronym CAMS (culture, automation, measurement, and sharing) is used to encapsulate its key themes. Culture is acknowledged as all important in making development and IT operations work together effectively. But what is culture in this context? It is not so much about an informal dress code, flexible hours, or a free in-house cafeteria as it is about how decisions are taken, norms of behavior, protocols of communication, and the ways of navigating hierarchy and bureaucracy to get things done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"In order to cultivate a culture of accountability, first it is essential to assign it clearly. People ought to clearly know what they are accountable for before they can be held to it. This goes beyond assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs). To be accountable for an outcome, we need authority for making decisions, not just responsibility for execution. It is tempting to refrain from the tricky exercise of explicitly assigning accountability. Executives often hope that their reports will figure it out. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Each organization has embedded in its corporate culture and in its rules and processes, its own understanding of business value and how to best create it." (Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value, 2016)
"The biggest challenge of making the evolution from a knowing culture to a learning culture [...] is really not the cost. Initially, it largely ends up being imagination and inertia." (Murli Buluswar, "How Companies Are Using Big Data and Analytics", 2016)
"The culture of your organization comprises your stated principles, and to a far greater extent, the actual lived principles as reflected by the attitudes, communication styles, and behaviors of your teams." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)
"Knowledge is in some ways the most important (though intangible) capital of a software engineering organization, and sharing of that knowledge is crucial for making an organization resilient and redundant in the face of change. A culture that promotes open and honest knowledge sharing distributes that knowledge efficiently across the organization and allows that organization to scale over time. In most cases, investments into easier knowledge sharing reap manyfold dividends over the life of a company." (Titus Winters, "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time", 2020)
"Culture is not something that can be read in a corporate document (though many organisations will claim to have values, beliefs and other concepts that articulate the culture as the corporate centre wants it to be seen). It is intangible and can be challenging to comprehend to those on the outside looking in. Much of it is unspoken, a series of behavioural norms which are engrained in the fabric of the organisation and drive attitudes of employees to one another, management, change programmes and any external (to the group, as well as the organisation) effort to drive change that may be resisted simply because it ‘isn’t the way we do things around here’." (Ian Wallis, "Data Strategy: From definition to execution", 2021)
"We can expect the revolution in communications to extend the power of our brains. Its ultimate effect will be the transformation and unification of all techniques for the exchange of ideas and information, of culture and learning. It will not only generate new knowledge, but will supply the means for its world-wide dissemination and absorption." (David Sarnoff)
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