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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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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Successful
Company
Success
Enterprises
Easy
Enterprise
Would
Companies
Life
Ground
World
Built
Motivational

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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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.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
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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.
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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
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Never confuse activity with results.
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.
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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and preselect and package what they want? My guess is they will both coexist.
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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.
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner