Lou Gerstner's Quotes

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

Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.

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.

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.

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

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

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't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.

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.

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.

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%.

You know, you don't need a leader to sort of administer something that's going very well. In fact, in one sense, an overly ambitious person in that circumstance can probably screw it up.