Top 40 Paul Gibbons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Feeling entitled is the opposite of feeling grateful. Gratitude opens the heart, entitlement closes it.”

— Paul Gibbons

2. “Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.”

— Paul Gibbons

3. “Most change strategy models are not very strategic – change strategy is an important lynchpin between business strategy and change tactics.”

— Paul Gibbons

4. “Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.”

— Paul Gibbons

5. “Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.”

— Paul Gibbons

6. “Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.”

— Paul Gibbons

7. “It is time to euthanize change management.”

— Paul Gibbons

8. “Change is the part of the very definition of life. The world changes, and flourishing demands constant growth and life-long learning.”

— Paul Gibbons

9. “The human side of analytics is the biggest challenge to implementing big data.”

— Paul Gibbons

10. “Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.”

— Paul Gibbons

11. “The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.”

— Paul Gibbons

12. “The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.”

— Paul Gibbons

13. “The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.”

— Paul Gibbons

14. “21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.”

— Paul Gibbons

15. “The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.”

— Paul Gibbons

16. “Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.”

— Paul Gibbons

17. “When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.”

— Paul Gibbons

18. “Most businesses would profit greatly from just applying Change Management 101 well.”

— Paul Gibbons

19. “All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.”

— Paul Gibbons

20. “Malcolm Gladwell puts the “pop” in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts – even by the researchers he makes famous.”

— Paul Gibbons

21. “Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.”

— Paul Gibbons

22. “Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.”

— Paul Gibbons

23. “The psychological theories that inform day-to-day business practices are comprised mostly of folk-psychology, fads, and myths.”

— Paul Gibbons

24. “Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.”

— Paul Gibbons

25. “The change “grief cycle”, for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.”

— Paul Gibbons

26. “Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.”

— Paul Gibbons

27. “People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.”

— Paul Gibbons

28. “The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.”

— Paul Gibbons

29. “Leaders need to sacrifice “power-over” to get “power-to”.”

— Paul Gibbons

30. “Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.”

— Paul Gibbons

31. “The notion of “business as usual” is a harmful myth.”

— Paul Gibbons

32. “Don’t let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.”

— Paul Gibbons

33. “Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.”

— Paul Gibbons

34. “Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.”

— Paul Gibbons

35. “Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.”

— Paul Gibbons

36. “We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.”

— Paul Gibbons

37. “Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.”

— Paul Gibbons

38. “That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.”

— Paul Gibbons

39. “Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.”

— Paul Gibbons

40. “Green light, STOP – if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.”

— Paul Gibbons

41. “Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste.”

— Paul Gibbons

42. “We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.”

— Paul Gibbons