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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
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
IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
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
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
The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
Lou Gerstner
Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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
We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Lou Gerstner
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
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
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
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
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
I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner
For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
Lou Gerstner
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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