Lou Gerstner Quotes

52 quotes in 767 categories

• It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.
• 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,…
• For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions
• No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.
• The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
• I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.
• 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…
• Fixing culture is the most critical − and the most difficult − part of a corporate transformation… In the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
• I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.
• Everything starts with the customer.
• I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.
• 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…
• Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.

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