Louis V. Gerstner quotes

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. (Louis V. Gerstner)
You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
When I arrived at IBM, there were 'Team' signs all around. I asked, 'How do people get paid?' They told me, 'We pay people based on individual performance. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
It's about communication. It's about honesty. It's about treating people in the organization as deserving to know the facts. You don't try to give them half the story. You don't try to hide the story. You treat them as - as true equals, and you communicate and you communicate and communicate. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
People do what you inspect, not what you expect. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
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. (Louis V. Gerstner)
My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
Compensation needs to be predominately performance-driven. 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. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
You know, you don't need a leader to sort of administer something that's going very well. In fact, in one sense, an overly ambitious person in that circumstance can probably screw it up. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
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. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
I want to take IBM back to its roots. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
What I'm trying to do is deliver results, not promises; results, not vision; results, not concepts. The world is cynical about IBM's promises. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
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. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
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. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability. (Louis V. Gerstner)
The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
A lot of people saved IBM. Yes, I was the leader of that team but I could never have done it without a group of IBMers helping me. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner
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. View quote
Louis V. Gerstner