Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Quotes

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

Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.

I want to take IBM back to its roots.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

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%.

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

I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.

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.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world.

It's been said that every institution is nothing but the extended shadow of one person.

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.

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.'

My parents worked enormously hard to put four children through college. We didn't have a lot of money.

Quite frankly, I am not very comfortable in chitchat. When I go to board meetings, I arrive two minutes before and leave when it's over. I don't stay for lunch or go early and have coffee.

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

Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.