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Never confuse activity with results.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Confuse
Activity
Results
Never

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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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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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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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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
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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’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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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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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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 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 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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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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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Lou Gerstner