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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
Lose
Loses
Success
Going
Never
Paranoid
Comfortable

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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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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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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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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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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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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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
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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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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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Never confuse activity with results.
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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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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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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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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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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