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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
Land
Water
Around
Structured
Trained
Missions
Air
Elements
Military

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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