Quote

People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.

Lou Gerstner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
People
Inspect
Expect

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

Image
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
Image
IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
Image
We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Lou Gerstner
Image
Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
Image
You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
Lou Gerstner
Image
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.
Lou Gerstner
Image
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
Image
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
Lou Gerstner
Image
My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
Lou Gerstner
Image
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