Quote

I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.

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
Cannot
Desks
Always
Enterprise
Believed
Behinds
Behind
Successful
Business
Running
Desk

More quotes by 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 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
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
Image
IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
Image
We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner
Image
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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