Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Edgar Schein

In most organizational change efforts, it is much easier to draw on the strengths of the culture than to overcome the constraints by changing the culture.

Leadership is the ability to step outside the culture to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive.

Culture is not a surface phenomenon, it is our very care

Activity proneness in the service of an ideology ... leads the individual into an irreversible series of commitments from which is forged an identity to which the individual inevitably becomes strongly attached psychologically.

We do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.

The only thing of real importance that leader do is to create and manage culture

The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.

A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.

Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.

The company ... has no rights to survive. But value systems and philosophies survive. People take them with them

I am defining leadership in terms of the role, not the position.