Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

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

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

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

When I arrived at IBM, there were 'Team' signs all around. I asked, 'How do people get paid?' They told me, 'We pay people based on individual performance.'

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.

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.

I want to take IBM back to its roots.

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

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%.

I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.

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

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.