Lou 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.

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

People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.

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.

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, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work.

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

Never confuse activity with results.

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.

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

Everything starts with the customer.

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

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 way the organization thinks, the way it responds, the way it leads. It's a lot more than just playing with boxes.

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.

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 are built from the ground up.

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

Technology has limitations on what it can accomplish. You do not.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.

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

You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.

Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.

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

I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.

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.

The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.

The rewards system is a powerful driver of behavior and therefore culture.