An Everyone Culture Quotes

“Better Me + Better You = Better Us”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“The way we’re going to be a better company is by your working on yourself, and helping others work on themselves.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“A DDO represents, instead, a rethinking of the very place of people development in organizational life. What if a company did everything within its power to create the conditions for individuals to overcome their own internal barriers to change, to take stock of and transcend their own blind spots, and to see errors and weaknesses as prime opportunities for personal growth?”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“+ Reflection = Progress”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“The company’s other primary commitment—to radical transparency—goes much deeper than the glass office walls. Every meeting is recorded, and (unless proprietary client information is discussed) every recording is available to every member of the organization. Each office and meeting room is equipped with audio recording technology. For example, if your boss and your boss’s boss are discussing your performance and you weren’t invited to the meeting, the recording is available for you to review. And you don’t have to scour every audio file to find out whether you were the subject of a closed-door conversation. If your name came up, you’re likely to be given a heads-up, just so that you will review the file. In effect, there is no such thing as a closed-door conversation; everything is part of a “historical record of what is true.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“It is a consistent mark of the DDOs we studied that the senior people are as deeply engaged in the personal growth journey as the newest hires. Working”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“But what is happiness? The definition most in vogue, fueled by the positive psychology movement, is one of happiness as a state, characterized by pleasure; a banishing of pain, suffering, and boredom; a sense of engagement and meaning through the experience of positive emotions and resilience. This is the dominant version of the new incomes sought and paid in the most widely celebrated “great places to work.” Think of flexible work hours, pool tables and dart boards, dining areas run by chefs serving fabulous and nutritious food at all hours, frequent talks by visiting thought leaders, spaces for naps, unlimited vacation time. However, the research literature on happiness suggests another definition, one that is overlapping but significantly different. The second definition sees happiness as a process of human flourishing. This definition, whose roots go back to Aristotle and the Greeks’ concept of eudaemonia, includes an experience of meaning and engagement but in relation to the satisfactions of experiencing one’s own growth and unfolding, becoming more of the person one was meant to be, bringing more of oneself into the world.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding. We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Any honest person working in a DDO will tell you there are times she would like a holiday from the DDO experience, but after you’ve worked in one, an ordinary workplace becomes for many the nice place to visit and not the place where you want to live.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, for example, places a high premium on what he calls “radical open-mindedness,” by which he means something qualitatively beyond a mere willingness to listen to a competing view when and if it comes to call. “To be radically open-minded,” he says, “you need to be so open to the possibility that you might be making a mistake and/or that you have a weakness that you encourage others to tell you so.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“When people hear ‘flourishing,’ they think of appreciation and good feelings. But growth and development does not always equal ‘feeling good.’ Our culture is not about maximizing the minutes you feel good at work. We don’t define flourishing by sitting-around-the-campfire moments. We ask people to do seemingly impossible things.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Like the two other DDOs, Next Jump challenges employees by moving them into roles for which they’re not yet prepared to succeed and then provides them with steady streams of feedback to help them grow into those roles. In all three companies, if you’re completely able to perform your role, it’s no longer the right role for you; it has no ‘stretch’ left.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Imagine so valuing the importance of developing people’s capabilities that you design a culture that itself immersively sweeps every member of the organization into an ongoing developmental journey in the course of working every day. Imagine making the organization itself--and not separate, extra benefits--the incubator of capability...Imagine finding yourself in a trustworthy environment, one that tolerates--even prefers--making your weaknesses public so that your colleagues can support you in the process of overcoming them...You’re imagining an organization that, through its culture, is an incubator or accelerator of people’s growth. In short, you’re imagining a deliberately developmental organization.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for...Most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“In the algorithms of its proprietary systems, the company has recorded all its technical investment knowledge—a set of principles to guide investing. As many as 98 percent of Bridgewater’s financial decisions are executed automatically based on that set of codified market decision rules. In contrast, the “Principles” document—the Bridgewater constitution, which all citizens of the company seek to uphold (or “fight like hell” to change, if they disagree)—is not about the laws of finance, the market economy, or investing. Instead, it’s about the ways people act to foster and preserve a culture of truth and transparency. The principles set a clear bar of excellence for all decision making and are the common textual and conceptual reference for every Bridgewater employee seeking to act in a principled way.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“The thing that we found . . . in our business, and I think for most businesses, you have to have better ideas than other people. That’s basically what it comes down to. We’re competing against everyone in the markets. The market price is a weighted-average view of what’s going to happen in the future. The only way you can know something better is to have a better understanding of what can happen in the future. So, it’s a perfect form of idea meritocracy. And for us the building blocks of that, of creating an idea meritocracy, is having a shared, transparent set of principles, so that everybody understands the roles, the constitution of the place . . . We have this notion about the constitution of the company that these are the principles. So that every decision, we are reflecting on, “What principles are at play? And how do you take this decision with respect to those principles?” . . . When we change our views, we’ll change it there, so that people can keep learning from that compounding understanding and thirty-five years of running this business . . . If you disagree with the principles, you gotta fight like hell. There’s no behind-the-corner talk.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Greg Jensen, co-CEO, explains that all this success derives from the company’s approach to its principles, a source of “compounding understanding,” much like compound interest, over time.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“The team’s diagnosis of a problem this morning centers on Sergio. The entire group has just spent time discussing Sergio’s most recent review. On any given day, all employees are getting and giving feedback from multiple sources about how they’re doing their jobs. Nothing in a formal review comes as a surprise. But it’s also expected that individual reviews will be discussed with the entire team and with total candor. Niko”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Over time, I came to formulate my purpose as providing contexts for people to flourish .”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

“Decurion exposes and overturns the assumption that work is public and the personal is private, and so the personal should not be part of work. In the same way, Decurion rejects the idea of work-life balance as a simple goal or mantra. After all, if your life is everything outside the workplace, then that leaves a bleak notion of what work is—something that we’re forced to trade off against joyful living.”
― Robert Kegan, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization