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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Vision
Lasts
Last
Right
Needs
Thing

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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I don't want to use the word reorganization. Reorganization to me is shuffling boxes, moving boxes around. Transformation means that you're really fundamentally changing the way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.
Lou Gerstner
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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
Lou Gerstner
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Lou Gerstner
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The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.
Lou Gerstner
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner
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Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
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Every now and then, a technology comes along that is so profound, so powerful, so universal, that its impact will change everything. It will transform every institution in the world. It will create winners and losers, will change the way we do business, the way we teach our children, communicate and interact as individuals.
Lou Gerstner
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
Lou Gerstner
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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
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We do not need Departments of Commerce, Labor, and Education we need a single Department of Skills that will promote an integrated approach to global competitiveness.
Lou Gerstner
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Lou Gerstner
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A lot of people saved IBM. Yes, I was the leader of that team but I could never have done it without a group of IBMers helping me.
Lou Gerstner
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If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.
Lou Gerstner
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If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world. Successful enterprises are built from the ground up.
Lou Gerstner
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner
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Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
Lou Gerstner
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You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.
Lou Gerstner