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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.

Lou Gerstner

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Lou Gerstner
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 1
Business Executive
Businessperson
Mineola
New York
Urgency
Enormous
Needed
Sense

More quotes by Lou Gerstner

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Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
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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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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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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
Lou Gerstner
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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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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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We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
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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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Never confuse activity with results.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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Everything starts with the customer.
Lou Gerstner
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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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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Lou Gerstner
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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.
Lou Gerstner
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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
Lou Gerstner