Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

I want to take IBM back to its roots.

I've been accepted at Cambridge University. I want to study Chinese history and archaeology. I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.

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

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

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

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.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

Whether the task is fixing health care, upgrading K-12 education, bolstering national security, or a host of other missions, the U.S. is better at patching problems than fixing them.

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

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.

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%.

Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. You can't assemble them with a bunch of acquisitions.

If life was so easy that you could just go buy success, there would be a lot more successful companies in the world.

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.