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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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