Quotes from Lou Gerstner

Everything starts with the customer.

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

Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues, I sack politicians.

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.

We do not need Departments of Commerce, Labor, and Education; we need a single Department of Skills that will promote an integrated approach to global competitiveness.

The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.

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.