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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
Elements
Military
Land
Water
Around
Structured
Trained
Missions
Air

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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Everything starts with the customer.
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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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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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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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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.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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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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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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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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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.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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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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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
Lou Gerstner