Whether the task is fixing health care, upgrading K-12 education, bolstering national security, or a host of other missions, the U.S. is better at patching problems than fixing them. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can’t assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
I think that my leadership style is to get people to fear staying in place, to fear not changing. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
I’ve been accepted at Cambridge University. I want to study Chinese history and archaeology. I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we’re gunning for leadership. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
The value that some analysts put on revenue vs. what they put on profit is out of whack. If you can grow real cash earnings, that’s 80% of what you ought to do, and the revenue component is 20%. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
You can never be comfortable with your success, you’ve got to be paranoid you’re going to lose it. – Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
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, Jr.
