Louis V. Gerstner jr. – Who says Elephants can’t dance?

Louis V. Gerstner jr. – Who says Elephants can’t dance?

• “It is not helpful to feel sorry for ourselves. I’m sure our employees don’t need any rah-rah speeches. We need leadership and a sense of direction and momentum, not just from me but from all of us. I don’t want to see a lot of prophets of doom around here. I want can-do people looking for short-term victories and long-term excitement.”
• I told them there was no time to focus on who created our problems. I had no interest in that. “We have little time to spend on problem definition. We must focus our efforts on solutions and actions.”
• Management principles
• I manage by principle, not procedure
• The market place dictates everything we do
• I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues. I sack politicians
• I am heavily involved in strategy; the rest is yours to implement. Just keep me informed in an informal way. Don’t hide bad information. Solve problems laterally; don’t keep bringing them up the line.
• Move fast. I f we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow.
• Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put toether in meetings the people whi can help solve a problem.
• 5 ninety-day priorities upon start:
• Stop hemorrhaging cash
• Make sure we would be profitable in one years time
• Develop and implement a key customer strategy for year 1 and 2
• Finish right-sizing by the beginning of third quarter
• Develop an intermediate term business strategy
• Plus a thirty days assignment:
• Ten-page report from each BU leader
• I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched of the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, “Let’s just talk about your business”.
• I told the team that, effective immediately, the milking strategy was over and instructed them to get back to me with an aggressive price reduction plan
• When people realized that I really did read every one of the reports (from big clients problems to be solved from visiting them), there was quick improvement in action and responsiveness
• Turning around troubled companies, whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why.
• Sooner is better than perfect
• The real issue was going out and making things happen every day in the marketplace
• With an eye to the old management committee, I also announced what the CEO would not do: It would not accept delegation of problem solving. It would not sit through presentations or make decisions for the business units. Its focus would be solely on policy issues that cut across multiple units.
• No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language
• This is about the bone-jarringly difficult task of forcing the organization to limit its ambition and focus on markets that made strategic and economic sense.
• I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game. An organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
• My kind of executives dig into the details, work the problems day to day, and lead by example, not title.
• A good portion of our success was due to all of the deals we didn’t do
• People do what you inspect, not what you expect
• Companies don’t like to change because individuals don’t like to change
• I have always believed that it is better to underpromise and outperform than to overpromise and underperform