Denise Morrison Quotes

If I can impact an executive and his or her team, I can help to change the culture of an organization.

It all sounds almost silly, but the fact is that the only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it.

If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.

In a change effort, culture comes last, not first.

Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

None of us are naïve enough to believe that moving around boxes on organization charts will change behavior. You have to change culture.

As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.

Once you have a culture problem, it's very hard to fix.

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

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

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.

Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.

A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?

If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.

People have come to me over the years and said to me: 'I admire the culture of Starbucks. Can you come give a speech and help us turn our culture around?' I wish it were that easy. Turning a culture around is very difficult to do because it's based on a series of many, many decisions, and the organization is framed by those decisions.

You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.

If the culture you have is radically different from an 'experiment and take-risk' culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make - and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.

All too often, a corporate innovation initiative starts and ends with a board meeting mandate to the CEO followed by a series of memos to the staff, with lots of posters and one-day workshops. This typically creates 'innovation theater' but very little innovation.

When a culture is broken, the cracks show - morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That's why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.

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

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.

Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.

You can overcome wrong technology. Your people have the initiative, they see the problem, no big deal ... you can't overcome bad culture. You've gotta change whoever is in charge.

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