John Daly Quotes

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.

Any company faces big challenges during transformation. People are accustomed to going ahead on the existing track. Even when they know there are problems, the first reaction is to protect the old way.

Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

People don't want to embrace culture shifts because it's not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

[Independent Federal] agencies, like other bureaucracies don’t like being transformed.. They have cultures and they want to preserve those cultures.

Too often, companies focus on systems and structures that facilitate cultural change at the mid-management level, overlooking problems closer to the top.

There is an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.

Change, not habit, is what gets most of us down; habit is the stabilizer of human society, change accounts for its progress.

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.

Competence is the enemy of change!

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

Competent people are the most resistant to change

A change imposed is a change opposed.

In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

Don't Fall in Love with a Dreamer

The habit of taking the line of least resistance makes all rivers and some men crooked.

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.

It follows that acceleration in the rate of change will result in an increasing need for reorganization. Reorganization is usually feared, because it means disturbance of the status quo, a potential threat to peoples vested interests in their jobs, and an upset to established ways of doing things. For these reasons, needed reorganization is often deferred. With a resulting loss in effectiveness and increase in costs.

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.

I hate change more than almost anything.

We find that when we make an acquisition, or we have a hiring experience, that's one of the hardest things to change. If you've been working for a company where you didn't dare challenge your boss, or what's politically correct in the company, then it affects your career.