Top 40 Lou Gerstner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People don’t do what you expect but what you inspect.”

— Lou Gerstner

2. “Everything starts with the customer.”

— Lou Gerstner

Featured in: Service Quotes, Sales Motivational Quotes

3. “Customer complaints are the schoolbooks from which we learn.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

6. “Never confuse activity with results.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

9. “IBM needed – an enormous sense of urgency.”

— Lou Gerstner

10. “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

12. “Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

14. “I don’t want to use the word reorganization. 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.”

— Lou Gerstner

15. “What I’m trying to do is deliver results, not promises; results, not vision; results, not concepts. The world is cynical about IBM’s promises.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

18. “You don’t get points for predicting rain. You get points for building arks.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

20. “I want to take IBM back to its roots.”

— Lou Gerstner

21. “For the first month, I listened, and I tried very hard not to draw conclusions.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

23. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

24. “No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

26. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

27. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

28. “You can never be comfortable with your success, you’ve got to be paranoid you’re going to lose it.”

— Lou Gerstner

29. “I have always believed you cannot run a successful enterprise from behind a desk.”

— Lou Gerstner

30. “I initially wanted to be a teacher, and then I was going to become an engineer and build bridges and highways, but pretty soon I went into the business world. I never did get to be a teacher except in a different way.”

— Lou Gerstner

31. “If the practices and processes inside a company don’t drive the execution of values, then people don’t get it. The question is, do you create a culture of behavior and action that really demonstrates those values and a reward system for those who adhere to them?”

— Lou Gerstner

32. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

33. “The Internet is ultimately about innovation and integration, but you don’t get the innovation unless you integrate Web technology into the processes by which you run your business.”

— Lou Gerstner

34. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

35. “I think values are really, really important, but I also think that too many values are just words.”

— Lou Gerstner

36. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

37. “I’m leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.”

— Lou Gerstner

38. “I firmly believe that IBM’s size can be used to its advantage.”

— Lou Gerstner

39. “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.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner

42. “Lou Gerstner knows how to do a deal, and George Bush Sr., less so.”

— Lou Gerstner

43. “What we believe is going to be very important is the delivery of traditional software and services and hardware over the Net. That’s a form of electronic marketplace.”

— Lou Gerstner

44. “The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that’s what’s really going to affect employees.”

— Lou Gerstner

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

— Lou Gerstner