Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround Quotes

“So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“It isn’t a question of whether elephants can prevail over ants. It’s a question of whether a particular elephant can dance. If it can, the ants must leave the dance floor.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“E xecution—getting the task done, making it happen—is the most unappreciated skill of an effective business leader.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“human-intensive services business is entirely different. In services you don’t make a product and then sell it. You sell a capability. You sell knowledge. You create it at the same time you deliver it. The business model is different. The economics are entirely different.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, who’d once said, “When you see your competitor drowning, grab a fire hose and put it in his mouth.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“What I discovered was that senior executives often presided. They organized work, then waited to review it when it was done. You were a worker early in your career, but once you climbed to the top, your role was to preside over a process. Well, my kind of executives dig into the details, work the problems day to day, and lead by example, not title. They take personal ownership of and responsibility for the end result. They see themselves as drivers rather than as a box high on the organization chart.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“It’s been said that every institution is nothing but the extended shadow of one person.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“We got there in stages because, while you can force anything down the throat of an organization, if people don’t buy into the logic, the change won’t stick.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“When I arrived at IBM, new mainframes were announced every four to five years. Today they are launched, on average, every eighteen months (with excellent quality, I might add). I can understand the joke that was going around IBM in the early 1990s: “Products aren’t launched at IBM. They escape.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“Yet the hardest part of these decisions was neither the technological nor economic transformations required. It was changing the culture—the mindset and instincts of hundreds of thousands of people who had grown up in an undeniably successful company, but one that had for decades been immune to normal competitive and economic forces. The challenge was making that workforce live, compete, and win in the real world. It was like taking a lion raised for all of its life in captivity and suddenly teaching it to survive in the jungle.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“envisioning System/360 was one thing. Making it a reality required the equivalent of a man-on-the-moon program. It cost nearly as much. Tom Watson’s memoir noted that the investment required—$5 billion (that’s 1960s dollars!)—was larger than what the Manhattan Project cost.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“So, execution is really the critical part of a successful strategy. Getting it done, getting it done right, getting it done better than the next person is far more important than dreaming up new visions of the future. All of the great companies in the world out-execute their competitors day in and day out in the marketplace, in their manufacturing plants, in their logistics, in their inventory turns—in just about everything they do. Rarely do great companies have a proprietary position that insulates them from the constant hand-to-hand combat of competition.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“Watson’s eminently sensible direction was: Respect your customer, and dress accordingly. However, as the years went by, customers changed how they dressed at work, and few of the technical buyers in corporations showed up in white and blue. However, Watson’s sensible connection to the customer was forgotten, and the dress code marched on. When I abolished IBM’s dress code in 1995, it got an extraordinary amount of attention in the press. Some thought it was an action of great portent. In fact, it was one of the easiest decisions I made—or, rather, didn’t make; it wasn’t really a “decision.” We didn’t replace one dress code with another. I simply returned to the wisdom of Mr. Watson and decided: Dress according to the circumstances of your day and recognize who you will be with (customers, government leaders, or just your colleagues in the labs).”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”
― Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change