Company culture quotes: 45 sourced quotes for teams

Organizational culture quotes: what culture is

For the first slide of a values deck or a culture survey readout.

1. 1

   I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game.

   Louis V. Gerstner Jr., IBM chief executive

   Copy
2. 2

   Culture, more than rule books, determines how an organization behaves.

   Warren Buffett, longtime Berkshire Hathaway CEO

   Copy
3. 3

   Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.

   Geert Hofstede, social psychologist

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4. 4

   A word about corporate cultures: for better or for worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage.

   Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder

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5. 5

   Organizational cultures are created by leaders, and one of the decisive functions of leadership may well be the creation, the management, and... the destruction of culture.

   Edgar Schein, organizational psychologist

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6. 6

   One of the best mechanisms that founders, leaders, managers, or even colleagues have available for communicating what they believe in or care about is what they systematically pay attention to.

   Edgar Schein, organizational psychologist

   Copy
7. 7

   Without exception, the dominance and coherence of culture proved to be an essential quality of the excellent companies.

   Tom Peters, management writer

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8. 8

   We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

   Winston Churchill, British prime minister

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Team culture quotes on values and trust

Values are what a company says; trust is whether people believe it.

Growing company quotes

For the all-hands after headcount doubles, or the planning offsite.

25. 25

    The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.

    Arie de Geus, Shell strategist

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26. 26

    I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.

    Akio Morita, Sony co-founder

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27. 27

    Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.

    Peter Drucker, management thinker

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28. 28

    There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

    Peter Drucker, management thinker

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29. 29

    Bureaucratic procedures beget more bureaucracy, and imperial corporate palaces induce imperious behavior.

    Warren Buffett, longtime Berkshire Hathaway CEO

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30. 30

    Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust.

    Margaret Heffernan, business author

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31. 31

    Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.

    Laurence J. Peter, Peter Principle author

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32. 32

    An enterprise will grow in accordance with the amount of effort you plow into it.

    Konosuke Matsushita, Panasonic founder

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33. 33

    Companies die because their managers focus on the economic activity of producing goods and services, and they forget that their organizations' true nature is that of a community of humans.

    Arie de Geus, Shell strategist

    Copy

Quotes on hiring for culture

For interviewer training and the culture section of the careers page.

34. 34

    If it's a distinctive culture, it will fit certain people like a custom-made glove. The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select.

    Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder

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35. 35

    One bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen.

    Adam Grant, organizational psychologist

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36. 36

    The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders.

    Simon Sinek, leadership author

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37. 37

    Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully.

    Stephanie Shirley, software company founder

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38. 38

    Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.

    Adam Grant, organizational psychologist

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39. 39

    Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

    Akio Morita, Sony co-founder

    Copy

Corporate culture quotes on change

For a reorg, a merger or a values refresh people are tired of hearing about.

40. 40

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

    John Kotter, change management professor

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41. 41

    It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

    Peter Senge, systems scientist

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42. 42

    A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time.

    John Kotter, change management professor

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43. 43

    People do what you inspect, not what you expect.

    Louis V. Gerstner Jr., IBM chief executive

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44. 44

    There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

    Margaret Wheatley, leadership writer

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45. 45

    We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture.

    John Kotter, change management professor

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How to use culture quotes at work

A quote with one real example reads as culture; a quote alone reads as a poster. Wording you can borrow:

1. In the values deck. One quote per value, then one real story of someone living it.“Clayton Christensen wrote that it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than 98%. Last quarter [name] turned down a deal that broke our pricing rule. That's the value.”
2. In onboarding. Use a quote to name one unwritten rule out loud.“Deming said to blame the process, not the people. Here, when something breaks, the first question is what let it happen, never who did it.”
3. As the corporate quote of the day. One each morning in the team channel, no commentary.“Quote of the day, from Winston Churchill: we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Writing the values themselves? See our core values examples. Running the program? Our culture committee ideas cover the rest of the year.

Famous culture quotes that are misattributed

These four are on most culture quote lists. Here is who really said them, or why we couldn't confirm it.

• “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” (usually credited to Peter Drucker)

  Wikiquote lists it as misattributed. Quote Investigator traced it to a 2000 article by Bill Moore and Jerry Rose in a paper industry magazine; it was first tied to Drucker in 2011, six years after he died.

• “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (usually credited to Aristotle)

  These are Will Durant's words, summing up Aristotle in The Story of Philosophy (1926). Wikiquote lists the line as misattributed to Aristotle.

• “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” (usually credited to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

  Wikiquote lists it as disputed: the popular versions are loose paraphrases of a longer passage in his book Citadelle (1948).

• “There is no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.” (usually credited to Richard Branson)

  It isn't on his Wikiquote page, and we couldn't trace it to a post, book or interview of his.

See your culture, then work on it

Quotes describe a culture; they can't tell you what yours is like. KraftyLab Intelligence sends a pulse survey automatically after every event to participants with an email, from 20 templates that run from eNPS to burnout. People answer in the browser with no account, and AI summaries pull out what they said. It also works on its own, without an event. Our culture platform pairs those surveys with workshops and team experiences you can book when you spot a problem.

Culture also shows in how a team plays together. Our virtual game shows put the whole company on one call with a live host, on Zoom by default (Teams, Meet or Webex on request). Teams split across time zones can book two sessions. Book about 2 weeks ahead; December dates fill first.