Lou Gerstner Quotes

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

Fixing culture is the most critical − and the most difficult − part of a corporate transformation… In the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.

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.

I think that my leadership style is to get people to fear staying in place, to fear not changing.

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.

We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.

I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.

IBM needed - an enormous sense of urgency.

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.

I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.

For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions

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.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

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.

This really is a merger of equals. I wouldn't have come back to work for anything less than this fantastic opportunity. This lets me combine my two great loves - technology and biscuits.

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.

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game.

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.

It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.

You don't get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.

Everything starts with the customer.

I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.

No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.

I think values are really, really important, but I also think that too many values are just words.

In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

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.

Never confuse activity with results.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.

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.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.

The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.

Technology has limitations on what it can accomplish. You do not.

Lou Gerstner knows how to do a deal, and George Bush Sr., less so.

The rewards system is a powerful driver of behavior and therefore culture.

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?

Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.