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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
Customer
Customers
Built
Company
Business
Back

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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Everything starts with the customer.
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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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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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
Lou Gerstner
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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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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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Never confuse activity with results.
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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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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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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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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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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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 look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Lou Gerstner