37 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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

I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.

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

The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we're gunning for leadership.

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.