Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.