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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Paranoid
Comfortable
Lose
Loses
Success
Going
Never

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
Lou Gerstner
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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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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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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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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
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
Lou Gerstner
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Lou Gerstner
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
Lou Gerstner
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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Lou Gerstner
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
Lou Gerstner
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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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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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In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Lou Gerstner