Corporate Stagnation Quotes

That just seems like a tough thing to do... just work in the middle of a company for your entire life. You just do the same thing out of college until you're 60, and then you retire.

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.

A record company used to be a very good thing, but they ended up soul-destroyingly trapping people in the accounting department. And you couldn't get any further, and the heads of each department were changing all the time, so you couldn't have any permanent relationship within the corporation.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

The organization that can't communicate can't change, and the corporation that can't change is dead.

The biggest threat to McDonald's lies within - and that is us as a company becoming complacent. There are a lot of companies that get fat, dumb and happy and take their eye off the ball and forget about serving customers.

The sad fact is that it would be fair to say that United is a generic, bureaucratic, tired company. A sort of DMV in the sky. No real culture. No real strategy. No real expectations for employees or customers. All of which is a shame.

I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.

I think Yahoo has been doing so many things well for so long and, frankly, got a little trapped in, I think, 'Oh, what is Yahoo?'

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

Every organization has two choices. Choice one is to grow. Choice two is to die. If you decide not to grow, it's a clear-cut message to talented people that it's time to leave.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

The principal reason, invariably, most "successful" giant companies rather quickly become also-rans, or just amorphous blobs on the competitive landscape, is their failure to re-tool in anything like a fundamental way. In fact, the worse things get, typically, the more they dig in their heels and defend yesterday's turf.

Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the curved wooden figurehead leads the ship .

A company in which anyone is afraid to speak up, to differ, to be daring and original, is closing the coffin door on itself.