Ginni Rometty: The ninth CEO (and first woman to lead) IBM, serving as chairman, president and CEO from 2011 to 2020 after a 40-year career that started as a systems engineer. She is the author of the memoir 'Good Power' and co-chairs the workforce nonprofit OneTen.
What this episode covers
Rometty reflects on running a 280,000-person, century-old company and the difference between running a company and changing one. She walks through IBM's massive reinvention toward hybrid cloud and AI, including the Red Hat acquisition, the PwC Consulting purchase, divesting the PC and chip-manufacturing businesses, and 22 straight quarters of revenue decline. She unpacks the framework from her book 'Good Power' (power of me, we, and us), her 'skills-first' philosophy of hiring for willingness to learn over credentials, and the importance of values, transparency, and being 'in service of' others. The conversation closes on AI milestones like Deep Blue and Watson, AI ethics and transparency, gender and role-model pressure, work-life balance, and advice to keep asking questions and stay patient.
The guest's own work
Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World
Ginni Rometty
“she's the author of a new book on power leadership and her life story called good power coming out on March 7th”— Lex Fridman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick
“so Kubrick's two thousand dollar Space Odyssey what do you think about the fact that HAL 9000 was named after IBM”— Lex Fridman
Big reveals from this episode
- When she took over, only 2 out of 10 IBM employees had the skills needed for the future.
- 'Growth and comfort never coexist', a defining lesson she credits to her husband.
- She initially turned down a major promotion saying she wasn't ready; her husband asked whether a man would have answered that way.
- During reinvention, headlines called IBM's situation 'existential' and warned it could go extinct without change.
- Over her tenure roughly 50% of IBM's portfolio was changed and ~$10B of businesses were divested.
- On the PwC Consulting acquisition she told a colleague it would 'kill me or catapult, probably nothing in between.'
- She says she researched and does not believe HAL 9000 in '2001: A Space Odyssey' was actually named after IBM.
- Reveals her father left the family homeless with four kids and no money, shaping her drive.
Worth remembering
- She reduced IBM's layers of management by about half to speed up decision-making.
- A low-income high school internship program led her to a 'skills-first' hiring philosophy beyond college degrees.
- She personally taught the first hour of compulsory monthly 'Think Academy' education every month for four years.
- Net of divestitures and currency, IBM's growth was flat through the transformation, which she considered a win given the scale.
- IBM's $34B Red Hat acquisition became the foundation of its hybrid cloud strategy.
- The PwC Consulting unit she negotiated for $3.5B grew to be worth about $19.5B and made $2.7B in profit.
- IBM deliberately used the word 'cognitive' instead of 'AI' to signal it helps, not replaces, human thinking.
- A company-wide 'cognitive jam' got around 100,000 employees to viscerally understand AI.
- She co-chairs OneTen, aiming to move 1 million Black employees into the middle class via skills, without requiring college degrees.
- She launched IBM 'returnships' after realizing even highly credentialed people lacked confidence to re-enter the workforce.