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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

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Done
Never
Saved
People
Group
Groups
Leader
Team
Helping
Without

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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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.
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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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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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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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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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Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
Lou Gerstner