Lou Gerstner Quotes
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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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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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Vision is easy. It's so easy to just point to the bleachers and say I'm going to hit one over there. What's hard is saying, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work.
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No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.
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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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You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.
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The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.
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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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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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The Internet is ultimately about innovation and integration, but you don't get the innovation unless you integrate Web technology into the processes by which you run your business.
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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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Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.
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The more successful enterprises are the more they try to replicate, duplicate, codify what makes us great. And suddenly they're inward thinking. They're thinking how can we continue to do what we've done in the past without understanding that what made them successful is to take risks, to change and to adapt and to be responsive. And so in a sense success breeds its own failure. And I think it's true of a lot of successful businesses.
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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've been accepted at Cambridge University. I want to study Chinese history and archaeology. I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.
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I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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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.
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I initially wanted to be a teacher and then I was going to become an engineer and build bridges and highways but pretty soon I went into the business world. I never did get to be a teacher except in a different way.
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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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Quite frankly, I am not very comfortable in chitchat. When I go to board meetings, I arrive two minutes before and leave when it's over. I don't stay for lunch or go early and have coffee.
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I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.
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I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
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The networked world offers the promise that maybe the information technology industry will start to, for the first time in a decade or so, address CEO-level issues.
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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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The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
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I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.
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I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.
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