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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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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Create
Values
Ends
Nothing
Collectives
People
Collective
Organization
Capacity
Value

More quotes by 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.
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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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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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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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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.
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Never confuse activity with results.
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If the practices and processes inside a company don't drive the execution of values, then people don't get it. The question is, do you create a culture of behavior and action that really demonstrates those values and a reward system for those who adhere to them?
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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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.
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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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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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What we believe is going to be very important is the delivery of traditional software and services and hardware over the Net. That's a form of electronic marketplace.
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.
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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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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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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
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Everything starts with the customer.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
Lou Gerstner