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

Lou Gerstner

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

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.
Lou Gerstner
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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?
Lou Gerstner
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
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Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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
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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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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
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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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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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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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner