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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
Trained
Missions
Air
Elements
Military
Land
Water
Around
Structured

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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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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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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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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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 don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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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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Everything starts with the customer.
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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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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
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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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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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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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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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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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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
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner