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.
Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.
Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.
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%.
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 mi...
People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.
Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.
The real mechanism for corporate governance is the active involvement of the owners.
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.
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 ...
I want to take IBM back to its roots.
The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and ...
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.
I firmly believe that IBM's size can be used to its advantage.
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.'
Our military should be trained and structured around missions, not the elements of air, water, and land.
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.
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.
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.
