Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Quotes
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People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
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When a manufacturing company in Spain looks to IBM for a solution to a problem, they expect us to bring the best of IBM worldwide to it, not just the experience of IBM Spain.
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The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and preselect and package what they want? My guess is they will both coexist.
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Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.
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The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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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%.
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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.
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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.'
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Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.
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Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.
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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.
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You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.
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I think that my leadership style is to get people to fear staying in place, to fear not changing.
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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.
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Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
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Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
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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.
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The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.
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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.
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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.