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Everything starts with the customer.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Customer
Starts
Customers
Everything

More quotes by 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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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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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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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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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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
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
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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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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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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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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
Lou Gerstner