Quote

Everything starts with the customer.

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
Customer
Starts
Customers
Everything

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

Image
I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
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
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
Image
I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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
IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
Image
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
Image
My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
Lou Gerstner
Image
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
Image
We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Lou Gerstner
Image
For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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
In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Lou Gerstner
Image
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner