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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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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Air
Elements
Military
Land
Water
Around
Structured
Trained
Missions

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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Everything starts with the customer.
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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 real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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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.
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
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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 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.
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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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.
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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.
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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Never confuse activity with results.
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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.
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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.
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