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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Governance
Involvement
Mechanism
Owners
Corporate
Active
Real

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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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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
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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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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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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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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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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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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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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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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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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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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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Never confuse activity with results.
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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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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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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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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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