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

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Believed
Behinds
Behind
Successful
Business
Running
Desk
Cannot
Desks
Always
Enterprise

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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.
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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.
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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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.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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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.
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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?
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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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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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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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Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
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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 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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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner