Quote

We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.

Lou Gerstner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Built
Company
Business
Back
Customer
Customers

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

Image
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.
Lou Gerstner
Image
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
Lou Gerstner
Image
For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
Image
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
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.
Lou Gerstner
Image
You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
Image
I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
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?
Lou Gerstner