Rosabeth Moss Kanter Quotes

Leaders must wake people out of inertia. They must get people excited about something they've never seen before, something that does not yet exist.

A self-reinforcing upward spiral: performance stimulating pride stimulating performance.

One of the symptoms of a losing streak is a turnover of top executives. It's a revolving door.

To take full advantage of the potential in e-business, leaders must lead differently, and people must work together differently. Let's call this new way of working e-culture-the human side of the global information era, the heart and soul of the new economy.

Too many people let others stand in their way and don't go back for one more try.

The importance of discretion increases with closeness to the top of a hierarchical organization.

If world problems feel too big to tackle, think small. Step by step. Small wins build confidence, lead the way to change.

Sports is a perfect activity in which to see streaks and cycles, organizational and otherwise, in action - and to watch confidence build or erode. There are repeated episodes of performance with similar rules and clear winners or losers. I added team sports to my studies of business because there are excellent parallels to work groups in the performance of sports teams and also excellent parallels to larger, more complex businesses or organizations in the strategy, structure, and culture surrounding any particular team.

To stay ahead, you must have your next idea waiting in the wings.

I was determined to achieve the total freedom that our history lessons taught us we were entitled to, no matter what the sacrifice.

It is easier to talk about money -- and much easier to talk about sex -- than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it; people who want it do not want to appear to hunger for it; and people who engage in its machinations do so secretly.

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.

Power is America's last dirty word. It is easier to talk about money - and much easier to talk about sex - than it is to talk about power.

The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.

Confidence is not lodged in people's brains, it comes from the support system that surrounds them. Let's not confuse confidence overall with just self-confidence. Self-confidence is only one part of confidence. People also need confidence in others - their colleagues and leaders - that they can count on them to do the right thing and not to let them down.

Power stems from 'rainmaking,' as law firms put it: the ability to bring resources into the company.

Confidence makes you willing to try harder and attracts the kind of support from others that makes "winning" possible.

Nations need to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and India's tradition of dissent and democratic debate is a positive aspect.

Change is a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done by me.

A great thinker once described innovative thinkers this way: "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" Innovative thinkers are constantly asking questions such as these. How can we improve recruiting, hiring and training. How can be add greater value to our products and services by making them even better? How can we do more to nourish the personal as well as professional development of our people? What more can we do as a good citizen where we do business?

Innovative organizations provide the freedom to act which arouses the desire to act.

Creativity does not derive from order but from the attempt to impose order where it does not exist, to make new connections.

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.

Confidence is not just in people's heads; it comes from the culture of the organization. It's easier to expect success when working in an organization that has a culture of accountability, collaboration, and initiative. Without this, it's easier - and more self-protective - to assume failure so the person is not disappointed and instead pleasantly surprised.

Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.

Confidence is the bridge connecting expectations and performance, investment and results.

After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.

The very lack of opportunity the group faces creates a self-defeating cycle and puts pressure on members to limit their aspirations.

Companies used to be able to function with autocratic bosses. We don't live in that world anymore.

Money should never be separated from values. Detached from values it may indeed be the root of all evil. Linked effectively to social purpose it can be the root of opportunity.

A great idea is not enough.

Not everyone in an organization is in a position to accumulate power through competent performance because most people are just carrying out the ordinary and the expected - even if they do it very well. The extent to which a job is routinized fails to give an advantage to anyone doing it because 'success' is seen as inherent in the very establishment of the position and the organization surrounding it. Neither persons nor organizations get 'credit' for doing the mandatory or the expected.

The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.

I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.

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.

... people are capable of more than their organizational positions ever give them the tools or the time or the opportunity to demonstrate.

Leadership is one of the most enduring, universal human responsibilities.

A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.

Confidence is the sweet spot between arrogance and despair-consisting of positive expectations for favorable outcomes.

What being among the 'right people' entails is the possession of human capital, rather than organizational capital: an individual reputation, portable skills, and network connections. Career responsibility is squarely in the hands of individuals, a function of their knowledge and networks. Transferable knowledge is more important to a career than firm-specific knowledge.

The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.

Friendly people are caring people, eager to provide encouragement and support when needed most.

Change masters are - literally - the right people in the right place at the right time. The right people are the ones with the ideas that move beyond the organization's established practice, ideas they can form into visions. The right places are the integrative environments that support innovation, encourage the building of coalitions and teams to support and implement visions. The right times are those moments in the flow of organizational history when it is possible to reconstruct reality on the basis on accumulated innovations to shape a more productive and successful future.

Lack of opportunity breeds dreams of escape. But professionals and managers who have invested in their careers do not leave the work force as frequently as discouraged workers in lower status occupations. Instead, they keep working, but they escape emotionally by defining achievement in professional, not company, terms. ... Thus, the potential for being stuck as career uncertainty grows takes its toll in weakening attachment to any particular employer.

if networks of women are formed, they should be job related and task related rather than female-concerns related. Personal networks for sociability in the context of a work organization would tend to promote the image of women contained in the temperamental model - that companies must compensate for women's deficiencies and bring them together for support because they could not make it on their own. But job-related task forces serve the social-psychological functions while reinforcing a more positive image of women.

The positive outlook that optimists project does not come from ignoring or denying problems. Optimists simply assume that problems are temporary and can be solved, so optimists naturally want more information about problems because then they can get to work and do something. Pessimists are more likely to believe that there is nothing they can do anyway, so what's the point of even thinking about it?

Time is a function of impact. The longer a book of mine has been in print, the greater its impact seems to be as people absorb and digest my ideas. I am especially proud of The Change Master: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, first published in 1983, because it raised questions and addressed issues at a time when so many great changes were occurring in our society, indeed throughout the world.

Even the new feminist research on sex-role socialization and sex differences has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of creating a new set of stereotypes about what women feel and how women behave. Despite the large amount of overlap between the sexes in most research, the tendency to label and polarize and thus to exaggerate differences remains in much reporting of data, which may, for example, report the mean scores of male and female populations but not the degree of overlap.