Sebastian Thrun Quotes

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.

Creative people are notoriously the slowest to adopt new technology.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

It appears that PepsiCo views structural change as a sign of weakness, an admission of failure, and an untenable break with past traditions.

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face

In an organization that is unwilling to change, find the opportunity to talk and interact with people - figure out why they don't want to change. It could be habits. It could be people's personal equities and reputations are defined by the role they're in or the process they've mastered.

People tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change. In the short-term, it's not going to make that much of a difference.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

Incrementalism in technology leads to irrelevance; what you need is revolutionary change.

Persuading employees to let go of old values and beliefs and adopt new ones can be challenging.

Anyone in a large organization who thinks major change is impossible should probably get out.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

John Akers once said that changing IBM's culture was more difficult than getting elephants to dance. Of course it's really difficult, as Lou Gerstner also found out years later. The title of his own book is Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? He and his top executives were change masters at IBM. All organizations, especially the larger ones, will always need change masters. Dissatisfaction with the status quo and efforts to improve it should be encouraged rather than discouraged. Regrettably, that is often not the case.

Does management resist the institutional imperative?

This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.

Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.

Your organization can start tweeting, but that wont change its DNA.

Fixing culture is the most critical − and the most difficult − part of a corporate transformation… In the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

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.