It sounds as if Lou Gerstner is looking for a new challenge: at all events, he told Handelsblatt in an interview that German industry has been resting on its laurels for too long and must abandon its self- satisfaction in order to implement the changes needed to remain competitive – as he says IBM has done. The problem that all successful enterprises have is that they tend to institutionalize the things that made them successful, Gerstner said. During his visit to Germany, Gerstner met Chancellor Helmut Kohl and talked about the economy, industry and technology, and complained that Europe as a whole invested $100,000m a year less in information technology than the US and that he considered this to be a serious deficit on the part of the region’s industry.
