85 Quotes by Lou Gerstner

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

It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.