Corporate Culture Quotes

“Effective board governance hinges on adapting strategic direction
based on changing market conditions and emerging opportunities.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance

“People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.”
― Howard Schultz, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

“He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.”
― Jess C. Scott, Sven

“But in the military you don't get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with.

The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out.

That was the military.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.”
― William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion

“To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.”
― Howard Schultz, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

“We are constantly evolving as we are interacting with the world. Mindfulness and growth mindset drives our evolution faster and on right tracks.”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management

“A well-rounded board can leverage the collective wisdom of its members to make more informed and robust decisions.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance

“The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Embracing data-driven decisions allows organizations to uncover valuable insights, adapt to changing market conditions, and stay ahead of the beat, ultimately increasing their chances of success and growth.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Capital Acquisition: Small Business Considerations for How to Get Financing

“Vaughan operates in a different way from me and most of the policy team. He decides to crack the China market with his golf clubs, sending updates about whom he has golfed with and how this might lead to opportunities to meet with key government officials. The actual work, preparing briefings, tracking regulations, or analysing political developments, he delegates to interns, or the women who work for him.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Like many things at Facebook, it didn't matter what the policy team debated or decided; it mattered what Sheryl thought. In this case she had run into one of her Harvard friends, a surgical director of liver transplantation, at a Harvard reunion and offered to help him source donors.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.”
― Joseph Heller, Something Happened

“Our faces portray the emotions our colleagues and bosses expect. We gladly show those that earn points and brilliantly hide those that do not. Nothing is real about it; it's business and we're supposed to feel okay about it for at least 60 hours per week. If you're lucky, you get used to it. You become highly-skilled at it until you're an invincible corporate giant -- king of a mountain that means very little in the end. - Holly Carter”
― Penelope Przekop, Centerpieces

“Earning a diploma, certification, or degree and developing a skillset does not independently guarantee anything. They are a beginning. Everything, anything, or absolutely nothing can potentially happen as you spend the precious time you have to be alive. The exciting news is that you are a manufacturer, and with that comes tremendous power. As the manufacturer of your career and your life, you can create the outcomes you want.”
― Penelope Przekop, 5-Star Career

“Regardless of the details of your story, your time bank is growing smaller every day. You are the manufacturer! You have the power to set the tone and control the factory floor.”
― Penelope Przekop, 5-Star Career

“Applying a systems perspective to your life would mean managing all the parts as a unified whole to achieve your mission. It also means ensuring that all the various parts of your life work together in a fully interconnected, unified, and mutually beneficial manner. Compartmentalization is out, just as silos are frowned on in corporations. You may have heard about breaking down organizational silos. Now, it’s time to break down the silos within yourself.”
― Penelope Przekop, 5-Star Career

“Oto ironia, przed którą stają wszystkie rozwijające się firmy: wzrost rodzi złożoność, a złożoność zabija wzrost”
― John Vincent, Winning Not Fighting: Why you need to rethink success and how you achieve it with the Ancient Art of Wing Tsun

“Biznesy i inne organizacje są jak religie. Mają wrodzoną tendencję do tego, by z czasem stać się zależnymi od reguł i tylko niewielu pamięta, dlaczego te reguły stworzono. Niszczą one swobody, zamiast je respektować i tworzą sklerotyczną kulturę".”
― John Vincent, Winning Not Fighting: Why you need to rethink success and how you achieve it with the Ancient Art of Wing Tsun

“The impact of personality was overridden by whether the employees at the company perceived social norms that favored speaking up. If a company were interested in getting people to speak up, they'd be better off putting their energy into cultivating new norms rather than selecting gregarious employees.”
― Geoffrey L Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides - Library Edition

“Another way to foster a sense of belonging for employees is to form teams that are encouraged to engage in collective problem-solving. This affords regular opportunities for all members of the teams to express their views and contribute their talents. But leaders of these teams should establish the norm that colleagues treat each other with respect, making room for everyone in discussions and listening thoughtfully to one another. As we saw with high-status students leading the way in establishing an antibullying norm in schools, managers, as the highest-status member of a team, can set powerful norms. A key goal is foster what leadership scholar Amy Edmonson calls psychological safety, which she describes as "the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed--with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns--without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid." No matter how ingenious or talented individual team members are, if the climate does not foster the psychological safety people need to express themselves, they are likely to hold back on valuable input.”
― Geoffrey L Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides - Library Edition

“The Boeing 737 Max accidents are a reflection of modern USA corporate culture.”
― Steven Magee

“Corporate alchemy isn’t just dark magic; it’s a tragic comedy, a satire as I imagine being written by Kafka on a bad day.”
― Rove Monteux, What is Wrong with Corporations Today

“In the corporate hustle, don't let the weight of success be the anchor of your mental well-being. Seek balance, not burnout.”
― Abhysheq Shukla, Feelings Undefined: The Charm of the Unsaid

“Strange is the ordinary way in which Corporate America expects us to shrink from our full potential to get along.”
― Julieanne O'Connor

“The Executive Leadership Assessment (results) quickly devolved into arguments about the ways in which Disney management did or did not function as a team, which pretty much proved the consultant’s point: that Disney’s top-tier executives, under Michael Eisner’s governance, does not make a good team; They don’t qualify as "a team," much less a group. Later, Eisner dismissed the whole experiment as a waste of time. Away from Eisner, several of the participants later conceded the issue. ‘What Michael likes is to put six pit bulls together and see which five die,’ one said.”
― James B. Stewart, Disney War

“In gathering data from more than five hundred people about their experience on more than one thousand teams, I have found a consistent
reality: When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive.

When there is a lack of clarity, people waste time and energy on the trivial many. When they have sufficient levels of clarity, they are capable of greater breakthroughs and innovations—greater than people even
realize they ought to have—in those areas that are truly vital. In my work, I have noticed two common patterns that typically emerge when
teams lack clarity of purpose.

PATTERN 1: PLAYING POLITICS

In the first pattern, the team becomes overly focused on winning the attention of the manager. The problem is, when people don’t know what the end game is, they are unclear about how to win, and as a result they
make up their own game and their own rules as they vie for the manager’s favor. Instead of focusing their time and energies on making a
high level of contribution, they put all their effort into games like attempting to look better than their peers, demonstrating their self-importance, and echoing their manager’s every idea or sentiment. These kinds of activities are not only nonessential but damaging and
counterproductive.”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“Many people have asked me recently what I make of all the workplaces who were so quick to roll back on their DEI practices. My answer is that these are very likely the kind of workplaces that have abused, misapplied, and co-opted DEI initiatives all along. It is proof that they were never serious about such initiatives in the first place. For them, DEI work was just playing the game, and the game they play is quick to change when the rules of that game are changed.

[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“The dialogue is key. The hallmark of stewardship in action here is to ask people to talk about what matters to them, not to ask people to support what matters to us. Discuss common values if you must, but do not institutionalize them. Once they appear on a wall plaque they become dogma and lose their meaning. If we need to write them everywhere to remember them, then how important were they? We only make lists of things we would just as soon forget.”
― Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest

“Storytelling in a broader sense—giving clarity, meaning and motivation—is something that is relevant to every department in every industry, at every level. It is mission critical.”
― Jyoti Guptara, Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack: How Do Stories Work? Unlock the Software of the Mind