I've had to do plenty of unpopular things. I think anytime you have to run a company that endures
a century and has to endure another century, you will do unpopular things. You have no choice.
I often felt I had to sacrifice things for the long term. Whether that would have been really
difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like, hey,
we're going to change the way we do our semiconductors and a whole different philosophy,
you have no choice. I mean, and in times of crisis as well, you've got to be,
I always said, it's not a popularity contest.
The following is a conversation with Jeanne Vermette, who was a long time CEO,
president and chairman of IBM. And for many years, she was widely considered to be one of the most
powerful women in the world. She's the author of a new book on power, leadership, and her life story
called Good Power, coming out on March 7th. She is an incredible leader and human being,
both fearless and compassionate. It was a huge honor and pleasure for me to sit down and have
this chat with her. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Jeanne Vermette.
You worked at IBM for over 40 years, starting as a systems engineer, and you ran the company
as chairman, president, CEO from 2011 to 2020. IBM is one of the largest tech companies in the world
with, maybe you can correct me on this, with about 280,000 employees. What are the biggest
challenges running the company of that size? Let's start with a sort of big overview question.
The biggest challenges I think are not in running them, it's in changing them. And that idea to know
what you should change and what you should not change. Actually, people don't always ask that
question, what should endure, even if it has to be modernized, but what should endure. And then I
found the hardest part was changing how work got done at such a big company. What was the part that
you thought should endure? The core of the company that was beautiful and powerful and could persist
through time, that should persist through time. I'd be interested, do you have a perception of what you
think it would be? Do I have a perception? Well, I'm a romantic for a history of long-running
companies, so there's kind of a tradition as an AI person. To me, IBM has some epic sort of research
accomplishments where you show off, you know, Deep Blue and Watson, just impressive big moonshot
challenges and accomplishing those. But that's I think that's probably a small part of what IBM is.
That's mostly like the sexy public-facing part. Well, certainly the research part itself
is over 3,000, so it's not that small. That's a pretty big research group. But the part that
should endure ends up being, you know, a company that does things that are essential to the world.
Meaning, you know, think back. You said you're a romantic. It was the 30s, the social
security system. It was putting the man on the moon. It was, you know, to this day, banks don't run,
you know, railroads don't run. That is at its core, it's doing mission-critical work.
And so that part, I think, is at its core, it's a business-to-business company. And at its core,
it's about doing things that are really important to the world, becoming running and being better.
Running the infrastructure of the world, so doing it at scale, doing it reliably.
Yes, secure in this world, that's like everything. And in fact, when I started,
I almost felt people were looking for what that was. And together, we sort of, in a word,
was to be essential. And the reason I loved that word was, I can't call myself essential. You have
to determine I am, right? So it was to be essential, even though some of what we did is
exactly what you said. It's below the surface. So many people, because people say to me, well,
what does IBM do now, right? And over the years, it's changed so much. And today, it's really
a software and consulting company. Consulting is a third of it. And the software is all hybrid
cloud and AI. That would not have been true, as you well know, back even two decades ago, right? So
it changes. But I think at its core, it's that be essential. You said moonshot. It can't all
be moonshots because moonshots don't always work, but mission critical work. So given the size,
though, when you started running it, did you feel the sort of thing that people usually associate
with size, which is bureaucracy, and maybe the aspect of size that hinder progress or hinder
pivoting? Did you feel that? You would, for lots of reasons. I think when you're a big company,
sometimes people think of process as the client themselves. I always say to people,
your process is not your customer. There is a real customer here that you exist for.
And that's really easy to fall into because people are a master to this process.
And that's not right. And when you're big, the other thing, and boy, there's a premium on it,
is speed, right? That in our industry, you got to be fast. And go back, like when I took over,
and it was 2012, we had a lot of catching up to do and a lot of things to do. And it was moving
so fast. And as you well know, all those trends were happening at once, which made them go even
faster. And so pretty unprecedented, actually, for that many trends to be at one time. And I
used to say to people, go faster, go faster, go faster. And honestly, I've tired them out.
I mean, it kind of dawned on me that when you're that big, that's a really valuable lesson.
And it taught me like the hows, perhaps more important than the what. Because if I didn't do
something to change how work was done, like change those processes, or give them new tools,
help them with skills, they couldn't. They're just like, do the same thing faster. If someone tells
you, you know, you got hiking boots, and they're like, no, go run a marathon. You're like, I can't
do it in those boots. But so you've got to do something. And at first, I think the ways for
I think the ways for big companies, I would call them like blunt clubs, you do what everyone does,
you reduce layers, because if you reduce layers, decisions go faster. There's just,
it's math. If there's less decision points, things go faster. You do the blunt club thing.
And then after that, though, it did lead me down a, you know, a long journey of they sound like
buzzwords. But if you really do them at scale, they're hard around things like agile. And
because you've really got to change the way work gets done. And we ended up training, God,
hundreds of thousands of people on that stuff. On how to do it correctly. On how to do it correctly.
That's right. Versus because everybody talks about it. But the idea that you would really have small
multidisciplinary teams work from the outside in set those sort of interim steps, you know,
take the feedback pivot, and then do it on not just products, do it on lots of things.
It's hard to do at scale. People always say, oh, I got this agile group over here of 40 people.
But not when you're a couple hundred thousand people, you got to get a lot of people to work
that way. The blunt club thing you're talking about. So flatten the organization as much as
possible. Yeah, yeah, I probably reduce the layers of management by half. And so that does,
that has lots of benefits, right? Time to a decision. More autonomy to people. And then
because and then the idea of like, faster clarity of where you're going, because you're not just
filtered through so many different layers. And I think it's the kind of thing a lot of companies,
if you're big, have to just keep going through. It's kind of like grass grows, you know, it just
comes back, and you kind of go back down and, and work on it. So it's a natural thing. But I hear so
many people talk about it, Lex, this idea of like, okay, well, who makes a decision? You've often
heard nobody can say yes, and everybody can say no. And that's actually what you're trying to get
out of a system like that. So I mean, your book in general, the way you lead is very much about we
and us, you know, the power of we. But is there times when a leader has to step in and be almost
autocratic, take control and make hard unpopular decisions? Oh, I am sure you know the answer to
that. And it is fun to hear you say it. Yeah. You know, because I actually, A, there's a leader for
a time, but then there's a leader for a situation, right? And so I've had to do plenty of unpopular
things. I think anytime you have to run a company that endures a century and has to endure another
century, you will do unpopular things. You have no choice. And I often felt I had to sacrifice
things for the long term. And whether that would have been, you know, really difficult things like,
you know, job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like, hey, you know, we're going
to change the way we do our semiconductors and a whole different philosophy. You have no choice.
I mean, and in times of crisis as well, you got to be, I always said it's not a popularity contest.
So that's, none of these jobs are popularity contests. I don't care if your company's got
one person or half a million, they're not popularity contests. But psychologically,
is it difficult to just sort of step in as a new CEO? Because you're fighting against tradition,
against all these people that act like experts of their thing, and they are experts of their thing,
to step in and say, we have to do it differently. When you got to change a company,
it's really tempting to say, throw everything else out back to that what must endure, right?
But I know when I took over to start, I knew how much had to change. The more I got into it,
I could see, wow, a lot more had to change, right? Because we needed a platform. We'd always done
our best when we had a platform, a technology platform. You will go back in time and you'll
think of the mainframe systems. You'll think of the PC. You'll think of perhaps middleware.
You could even call services a platform. We needed a platform, the next platform here to be there.
Skills. When I took over, if we inventoried who had modern skills for the future, it was
two out of 10 people. For the future. Not that they didn't have relevant skills today,
but for the future. Two out of 10. Yikes. That's a big problem, right? The speed at which things
were getting done. So you got so much to do and you say, is that a scary thing? Yes.
Do you have to sometimes dictate? Yes. But I did find, and it is worth it. I know every big
company I know, my good friend that runs General Motors, she's had to change. Go back to what is
them, them. When you do that, that back to be essential, we started with, hey, it's be essential.
Then the next thing I did with the team was say, okay, now this means new era of computing,
new buyers are out there, and eh, we better have new skills. Okay, now the next thing,
how do you operationalize it? It just takes some time, but you can engineer that and get people
to build belief. For the skills, that means hiring and it means training? Yes.
Yes. Oh boy, that's a long, skills is a really long topic in and of itself. I try to put my
view in it. I learned a lot and I changed my view on this a lot. I'll go back at my very beginning,
say 40 years ago. I would have said at that point, okay, I was always in a hurry. I was
interviewing to hire people. I don't know how you hire people. 40 years ago, I'd be like, okay,
I got to fit in these interviews. I got to hire someone to get this done. Okay. Then time would
go on. I'm like, oh, that's not very good. In fact, someone once said to me, hey, hire the
best people to work for you and your job gets a lot easier. Okay. I should spend more time on this
topic. I spend more time on it. Then it was like, okay, hire experts. Okay. Okay. Hired a lot of
experts over my life. Then I was really like an epiphany and it really happened over my tenure
running the company and having to change skills. If someone's an expert at something and has just
done that for 30 years, the odds of them really wanting to change a lot are pretty low. When
you're in a really dynamic industry, that's a problem. Okay. That was kind of my first
revelation on this. Then when I looked to hiring, I can remember when I started my job,
we needed cyber people. I go out there and I look. Unemployment in the US was almost 10%.
Can't find them. Okay. It's 10% and I can't find the people. Okay. What's the issue? Okay. They're
not teaching the right things. That led me down a path. It was serendipity that I happened to do
a review of corporate social responsibility. We had this one little fledgling school in a
low-income area. High school with a community college, we gave them internships, direction on
curriculum. Lo and behold, we could hire these kids. I said, this is not CSR. I just found a
new talent pool, which takes me to now what I'm doing in my post-retirement. I'm like,
this idea that don't hire just for a college degree, we had 99% of our hires were college
and PhDs. I'm all for it. You're very... Don't. I'm deeply offended. No, you should not be.
I'm vice chair at Northwestern, one of the vice chairs. I said, I just really like aptitude does
not equal access. These people didn't have access, but they had aptitude. It changed my whole view
to skills first. Now for hiring, that's a long story to tell you. The number one thing I would
hire for now is somebody's willingness to learn. You can test, you can try different ways, but
their curiosity and willingness to learn, hands down, I will take that trait over anything else
they have. The interview process, the questions you asked. Everything changed. The things you
talk to them about is try to get at how curious they are about the world. You can do testing.
We triangulated around it lots of ways. Look, at the heart of it, what it would do is change.
You don't think of buying skills. You think of building skills. When you think that way,
with so many people, and I think this country, many developed countries being disenfranchised,
you got to bring them back into the workforce somehow. They got to get some kind of contemporary
skills. If you took that approach, you can bring them back into the workforce.
Yeah, I think some interesting combination of humility and passion, because like you said,
experts sometimes lack humility if they call themselves an expert for a few too many years.
You have to have that beginner's mind and a passion to be able to aggressively constantly
be a beginner at everything and learn and learn and learn. I saw it firsthand when we were
beginning this path down the cloud in AI. People would say, oh, IBM, it's existential.
They got to change and all these things. I did hire a lot of people from outside
very willing to learn new things. Come on in. Come on in. I sometimes say shiny objects,
trained in shiny objects. Come on in. But I saw something. It was another one of these.
You're not a shiny object. I'm not saying that. But I learned something. Okay, some of them did
fantastic. Others, they're like, well, let me school you on everything. But they didn't realize
we did really mission-critical work and they'd break a bank. They would not understand the
certain kind of security and the auditability and everything they had to go on. Then I watched IBM
people say, oh, I actually could learn something. Some were like, yeah, okay, I don't know how to
do it. That's a really good thing I could learn. In the end, there was not one group was a winner
and one was a loser. The winners were the people who were willing to learn from each other.
I mean, to me, it was a very stark example of that point. I saw it firsthand. That's why I'm
so committed to this idea about skills first. That's how people should be hired, promoted,
paid, you name it. Yeah, the AI in general, it seems like nobody really understands now
what the future will look like. We're all trying to figure it out. What IBM will look like in 50
years in relation to the software business to AI is unknown. What Google will look like,
what all these companies were trying to figure it out. That means constantly learning,
taking risks, all of those things. Nobody's really skilled in AI.
You're absolutely right. That's right. I couldn't agree more with you on that.
You wrote in the book, speaking of hiring, quote, my drive for perfection often meant
I only focused on what needed to change without acknowledging the positive.
This could keep people from trusting themselves. It could take me a while to learn that just
because I could point something out didn't mean I should. I still spotted errors, but I became
more deliberate about what I mentioned and sent back to get fixed. I also tried to curtail my
tendency to micromanage and let people execute. I had to stop assuming my way was the best
or only way. I was learning that giving other people control builds their confidence and that
constantly trying to control people destroys it. So what's the right balance between showing the
way and helping people find the way? That is a good question because like a really flip answer
would be as it gets bigger, you have no choice but to just, you know, you can't do it. You have to,
you have to tell or show. I mean you've got to let people find their way because it's so big
you can't, right? That's an obvious answer. Scope of work, bigger it gets. Okay, I've got to let
more stuff go. But I have always believed that a leader's job is to do as well and I think there's
like a few areas that are really important that you always do. Now it doesn't mean you're showing.
So like when it has to do with values and value-based decisions, like I think it's
really important to constantly show people that you walk your talk on that kind of thing. It's
super important and I actually think it's a struggle young companies have because the values
aren't deeply rooted and when a storm comes it's easy to uproot. And so I always felt like when it
was that time I showed it. I got taught that so young at IBM and even General Motors that,
in fact I write, I do write about that in the book. First time I was a manager I had a gentleman
telling dirty jokes and not to me but to other people and it really offended people and some of
the women. This is the very early 80s and they came said something. I talked to my boss. I'm a
first-time manager and he was unequivocal with what I should do. He said, and this was a top performer,
it stops immediately or you fire him. So there are a few areas like that that I actually think
you have to always continue to role model and show, right? That to me isn't the kind that like
when do you let go of stuff, right? So the values and relationships with clients. Yeah, whatever
you're in service of. And the other thing was I really felt was really important to role model
learning, right? So, you know, I can remember when we started down the journey and we went on
to this thing called the Think Academy. IBM's longtime motto had been think. And we said, okay,
I'm going to make the first Friday of every month compulsory education. And okay, I mean everybody,
like everybody, I don't care what your job is, okay? When the whole company has to transform,
everybody's got to have some skin in this game and understand it. I taught the first hour of
every month for four years now. Nice. Okay, I had to learn something. So, but it made me learn,
but I was like, okay, if I can teach this, you can do it, right? I mean, you know, kind of thing.
So it was a compulsory Thursday night education for you. I'm a little bit better prepared than
that, but yes, you're so right. Yes. So you prepare? Yeah. So like personality wise, you
like to prepare? Yeah, but there's roots in that go back deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply. And I think
it's an interesting reason. So why do, why are you, you're prepared my friend? Yeah, sure. You
prepare for your interviews. Uh, sure. The rest you wing? Yeah, I wing. But that's okay. I mean,
you don't have to prepare everything. I don't prepare everything either. No, but I unfortunately
wing stuff. I save it to last minute. I push everything. I'm always almost late and I don't
know why that is. I mean, there's some deep psychological thing we should probably investigate,
but it's probably the anxiety brings out the performance. That can be. That's very true with
some people. I mean, so I'm a programmer and engineer at heart. And so, so programmers famously
overestimate or underestimate, sorry, how long that something's going to take. And so I just,
everything always underestimate and it's almost as if I want to feel this chaos of anxiety of
a deadline or something like this. Otherwise I'll be lazy sitting on a beach with a pina colada and
relaxing. I don't know. So that we have to know ourselves, but for you, you like to prepare. Yeah,
it came from a few different places. I mean, one would have been as a, as a kid, I think, um,
I was not a memorizer and my brother is brilliant. He can, he read it once, boom, done. And so I
always wanted to understand like how something happened. It didn't matter what it was I was
doing, whether it was algebra, theorems, I always wanted, don't give me the answer. Don't give me
the answer. You know, I want to figure it out, figure it out. So I could reproduce it again and
didn't have to memorize. So it started with that. And then over time, okay, so I was in university
in the seventies. When I was in engineering school, I was the only woman, you know, I meet
people still to this day and they're like, oh, I remember you. I'm like, yeah, sorry. I didn't
remember you. There were 30 of you, one of me. And I think you already get that feeling of, okay,
I better really study hard because whatever I say is going to be remembered in this class,
good or bad. And it started there. So in some ways I did it for two reasons. Early on,
I think it was a shield for confidence. The more I studied, the more prepared I was,
the more confident. That's probably still true to this day. The second reason I did it evolved over
time and became different to prepare. If I was really prepared, then when we're in the moment,
I can really listen to you. See, because I don't have to be doing all this stuff on the fly in my
head. And I could actually take things I know and maybe help the situation. So it really became a
way that I could be present and in the moment. And I think it's something a lot of people that in the
moment, I learned it from my husband. He doesn't prepare by the way at all. So that's not it. But
I watched the in the moment. No, no, no. And I'm not going to change that. As he says, he's a type
Z, I'm an A. Okay. And I have been married 43 years and that seems to work. So, but that idea
that you could be in the moment with people is a really important thing. And I think it's
important. Yeah. So the preparation gives you the freedom to really be present. So just to linger on
you mentioned your brother and it seems like in the book that you really had to work hard when
you studied to sort of given that you weren't good at memorization, you really truly deeply
wanted to understand the stuff and you put in the hard work and that seems to persist throughout
your career. So, you know, hard work is often associated with sort of has negative associations
when maybe with burnout with dissatisfaction. Is there some aspect of hard work at the core of who
you are that led to happiness for you? Did you enjoy it? I enjoyed it. So I will be the first
and I'm really careful to say that to people because I don't think everyone should associate
gee, to do what you did, you have to, there's only one route there, right? And that's just not true.
And I do it because I like it. In fact, I'm careful and as time goes on, you have to be
careful as more and more people watch you, whether you like it, you're a role model or not. You are
a role model for people, whether you know it, like it, want it, does not matter. I learned that the
hard way. And I would have to say to people, hey, just because I do this does not mean I do it for
these reasons, right? This would be really explicit. And I'd come to believe usually when
people say the word power, I don't know, do you have a positive or negative notion when I say
the word power? Probably negative one, yeah. For some stereotype or some view that somebody's
abused it in some way. You can read the newspaper, somebody's doing something. Personal people,
like I'll ask people, do you want power? And they're like, oh no, I'd rather do good.
And I think the irony is you need power to do good. And so that sort of led me down to,
and it was, I thought about my own life, right? Because it starts in a, like many of us, you know,
you don't have a lot, but you don't know that because you're like everybody else around you
at that time. And on one end tragedy, right? My father leaves my mother homeless, no money,
no food, nothing, four kids. She's never worked a day in her life outside of a home.
And I, the irony that I hear I would end up as the ninth CEO of one of America's iconic companies,
and now I co-chair this group 110. And that journey, I said the biggest thing I learned was,
you could do really hard, meaningful things in a positive way. So now you ask me about why do I
work so hard. I ended up writing the book in three pieces for this reason. When you really think of
your life and power, I thought it kind of fell like a pebble in water. Like there's a ring about,
you really care about yourself and like the power of yourself, power of me.
There's a time it transcends to that you are working with and for others and another moment
when it becomes like about society. So my hard work, I'd ask you, one day sit really hard and
think about when you close your eyes, who do you see from your early life, right? And what did you
learn? And maybe it's not that hard for you. I mean, it was, it's funny the things then,
if I really looked at it, it's no surprise what I do today. And that hard work part,
my great-grandma, as you and I were comparing notes on Russia, right? And never spoke English,
spoke Russian, came here to this country, was a cleaning person at the Wrigley building in
Chicago. Yet if she hadn't saved every dime she made, my mother wouldn't have a home and wouldn't
have had a car, right? What did I learn from that hard work? In fact, actually she, when I went to
college, she's like, you know, you really should be on a farm. You're so big and strong. You know,
that was her view. And then my grandmother, another tragic life. What did she do though?
And think how long, that's in the 40s, the 50s, she made lampshades. And she taught me
how to sew, right? So I could sew clothes when we couldn't afford them. But my memory of my grandma
is working seven days a week sewing lampshades. And then here comes my mom and her situation,
who climbs her way out of it. So I associate that with, well, strong women, by the way,
all strong women. And I associate hard work with how you are sure you can always take care of
yourself. And so I think that the roots go way back there and they were always teaching something,
right? My great-grandma was teaching me how to cook, how to work a farm, even though I didn't
need to be on a farm. My grandma taught me, you know, here's how to sew, here's how to run a
business. And then my mother would teach us that, look, with just a little bit of education, look at
the difference it could make, right? So anyways, that's a long answer too. I think that hard work
thing is really deeply rooted from that background. And it gives you a way out from hard times.
Yeah. You know, I think I've seen you on other podcasts say, I thought I did. Do you want a Plan
B? Didn't you say, no, you would not like a Plan B? Yeah, I don't want a Plan B. Because you're like,
I would prefer my back up against, am I remembering? You have a story like that.
You seem to have, like, at least certain moments in your life seem to do well in desperate times.
True enough. True enough, that's true. I learned that very well. But I also think that maybe this
isn't the same kind of Plan B. I think of it as, like, I was taught, like, always be able to take
care of yourself. Don't have to rely on someone else. And I think that, to me, so that's my Plan
B. I can take care of myself. And it's even after what I lived through with my father, I thought,
well, this set a bar for bad. After this, nothing's bad. And that is a very freeing thought.
The being able to take care of yourself, is that, you mean practically, or do you mean
just a self-belief that I'll figure it out? I'll figure it out and practically both, right?
So you wrote, quote, I vividly remember the last two weeks of my freshman year,
when I only had 25 cents left. I put the quarter in a clear plastic box on my desk and just stared
at it. This is it, I thought. No more money. So do you think there's some aspect of that
financial stress, even desperation, just being hungry? Does that play a role in that drive that
led to your success to be the CEO of one of the great companies ever? It's a really interesting
question because I was just talking to another colleague who's CEO of another great American
company this weekend. And he mentioned to me about all this adversity. And he said,
or I said to him, I said, do you think part of your success is because you had bad stuff happen?
And he said, yes. And so I guess I'd be lying if I didn't say, I don't think you have to have
tragedy, but it does teach you like one really important thing is that there is always a way
forward, always, and it's in your control. And I think there's probably wisdom for mentorship
there, or whether you're a parent or a mentor, that easy times don't result in growth.
Yeah, I've heard a lot of my friends and they worry, they say, geez, my kids have never had
bad times. And so what, you know, what happens here? So I don't know, is it, is it required?
And why you end up not required, but it sure doesn't hurt. You had this good line about
advice you were given that growth and comfort never coexist, growth and comfort never coexist.
And you have to get used to that thought. If someone said that they think of me like one of
the more profound lessons I had, and the irony is it's from my husband.
It's from my husband. And, uh, which is even more, you know, funny, actually.
You could just steal it. I mean, you don't have to give him credit.
I have, I have, shamelessly, as he'll tell you. Okay. So the story behind growth and
comfort never coexist, but honestly, I think it's been a really freeing thought for me.
And it's helped me immensely since mid-career. And, um, as I write about it in the book,
I'm mid-career and I'd been running a pretty big business actually. And the fellow I work for is
going to get a new job. He's going to get promoted. He calls me and he says, hey,
you're going to get my job. I really want you to have it. And I said to him, no way.
I said, I'm not ready for that job. I got a lot more things I got to learn. That is like a huge
job. Around the world, every product line, development, you name it, every function,
I can't do it. He looked at me. He says, well, I think you should go to the interview.
I went to the interview the next day, blah, blah, blah. Guy says to me, he looks at me and he says,
I want to offer you that job. And I said, I would like to think about it. I said,
I want to go home and talk to my husband about it. He kind of looked at me. Okay. I went home.
My husband is sitting there and he says to me, I went on and on about the story, et cetera.
And he says, do you think a man would have answered it that way? And I said, he says,
I know you. He's like, six months, you're going to be bored. And you, all you can think of is
what you don't know. And he said, and I know these other people, you have way more skill than them
and they think they could do it. And he's like, why, why? And for me, it internalized this feeling
that I'm going to, I am going to say something that's a bit stereotyped that it resonates with
many, many women. And I'll ask you if it does after is that they're the most harsh critic of
themselves. And so this idea that I won't grow unless I can feel uncomfortable. It doesn't mean
I always have to show it by the way. So that's why I meant growth and comfort can never coexist.
So I got, I was like, he's exactly right. Now, the end of that story is I went in and I took the job
when I went back to the man who was really my mentor looking out for me. And he, he looked at
me and he said, don't ever do that again. And I said, I understand because it was okay to be
uncomfortable. I didn't have to use it. I mean, now I would take stock of the things I can do,
right. And really think, or I look for times to be uncomfortable because I know if I am nervous,
like, I don't know if you're nervous to meet me. We never met in real person.
I'm still terrified.
No, you're not. But then you're, it means you're learning something, right?
Holding it together.
So that to me matters.
I think it's interesting the, maybe you could speak to that, the sort of the self-critical
thing inside your, inside your brain. Cause I think sometimes it's talked about that women
have that. But I have that definitely. And I think that's not just solely property of
women in the workplace, but I also want to sort of push back on the idea that that's a
bad thing that you should silence. Cause I think that anxiety that leads to growth also,
that's like this discomfort. So there's this weird balance you have to have between that
self-critical engine and confidence.
Yeah. I think that's a good point.
You have to kind of dance because if you're super confident, people will value you higher.
That's important. But if you're way too confident, maybe in the short term you'll gain,
but in the long term you won't grow.
Very good point. So I can't really disagree with that. And to me, even when I took on
jobs, I always felt people say, well, is it, you know, what point are you confident enough?
And I came to sort of believe again, a theme of my beliefs that if I was willing to ask
lots of questions and understood enough, that's all I needed to know.
Let me ask you about your husband a little bit. So you write in the book, you write in
the book. He's just jumping around at, like I said, I'm a bit of a romantic. So how did
you meet your husband?
So I met my husband when I was 19 years old. So I was a young kid. And I met him when I
had a General Motors scholarship. So I was at Northwestern University through my first
two years, had a lot of loans, financial aid. And a professor said, hey, you should sign
up for this interview. They're looking to bring forward diverse candidates through their
management track. Now, these programs don't exist anymore like that. They will pay your
tuition, your room and board, your expenses. Northwestern, other Ivy League schools, these
very expensive schools. And I think you'd be a good fit. I am eternally thankful for
that advice. When I interviewed, I actually got the scholarship. I mean, without it, I'd
have graduated with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. So part of that was in
the summer, I had to work in Detroit. I lived in a little room by a cement plant, not theirs.
But I mean, that's all I could afford.
Very romantic.
Very, very, very romantic. And the person who owned the house said, you know, hey, I'm
having a party. You're not invited. I'm going to fix you up with someone tonight. And that
turned out to be my husband. And so it was a blind date is how we very first met.
And then it was over. The story was written.
If it's okay, just zoom out to you mentioned power and good power a few times. So if we
can just even talk about it. Your book is called Good Power, Leading Positive Change
in Our Lives, Work and World. What is good power? What's the essence of good power?
So the essence of it would be doing something hard or meaningful, but in a positive way.
I would also tell you, I hope one day I'm remembered for how I did things, not just
for what I did. I think that could almost be more important. And I think it's a choice
we can all make. So the essence to me of good power, if I had a contrast, good to bad, let's
say, would be that first off, you have to embrace and navigate tension. This is the
world we live in. And by embracing tension, not running from it, you would bridge divides
that unites people, not divides them. It's a hard thing to do, but you can do it. You
do it with respect, which is the opposite of fear. A lot of people think the way to
get things done is fear. And then the third thing would be you got to celebrate some
progress versus perfection. Because I also think that's what stops a lot of things
from happening. Because if you go for whatever your definition of perfect is, it's either
polarization or paralyzation. I mean, something happens in there. Versus, no, no, no. Don't
worry about getting to that actual exact end point. If I keep taking a step forward of
progress, really tough stuff can get done. And so my view of that is, honestly, I hope
it can—you know, I said it's like a memoir with purpose. I'm only doing it. It was a
really hard thing for me to do because I don't actually talk about all these things. And
I had to—nobody cares about your scientific description of this. They want the stories
and your life to bring it alive. So it's a memoir with purpose. And in the writing
of it, it became the power of me, the power of we, and the power of us. The idea that
you build a foundation when you're young, mostly from my work life, the power of we,
which says I kind of, in retrospect, could see five principles on how to really drive
change that would be done in a good way. And then eventually you could scale that, the
power really of us, which is what I'm doing about finding better jobs for more people
now that I co-chair an organization called One Ten. So that essence of navigate tensions,
do it respectfully, celebrate progress, and give me—indulge me one more minute. These
sort of, again, it's retrospect that I didn't know this in the moment. I had to learn it.
I learned it. I am blessed by a lot of people I worked with and around.
But some of the principles, like the first one says, if you're going to do something,
change something, do something, you've got to be in service of something. Being in service
of is really different than serving, super different. And I just had my knee replaced.
And I interviewed all these doctors. You can tell the difference if the guy was going to do
a surgery, hey, my surgery is fine. I really don't care whether you can walk and do the stuff you
wanted to do again, because my surgery is fine. Your hardware is good. I actually had some
trouble. And I had a doctor who was like, you know, this doesn't sound right. I'm coming to
you. The surgery was fine. It was me that was reacting wrong to it. And he didn't care until
I could walk again. Okay, there's a big difference in those two things. And it's true in any business
you have. A waiter serves you food. Okay, he served his food. He did his job. Or did he care
he had a good time? So that thought to be in service of, it took me a while to get that,
like to try to write it, to get that across, because I think it's like so fundamental.
If people were really in service of something, you got to believe that if I fulfill your needs,
at the end of the day, mine will be fulfilled. And that is that essence that makes it so different.
And then the second part, second principle is about building belief, which is I got to hope
you'll voluntarily believe in a new future or in some alternate reality, and you will use your
discretionary energy versus me ordering you. You'll get so much more done. Then the third,
change and endure. We kind of talked about that earlier. Focus more on the how and the skills.
And then the part on good tech and being resilient. So anyways, I just felt that
like good tech, everybody's a tech company. I don't care what you do today. And there's some
fundamental things you got to do. In fact, pick up today's, any newspaper, right? Chat GPT. You're
an AI guy. All right. I believe one of the tenants of good tech is, it's like responsibility for the
longterm. And it says, so if you're going to invent something, you better look at its upside
and its downside. Like we did quantum computing. Great. A lot of great stuff, right? Materials,
development, risk management calculations, endless lists one day. On the other side,
it can break encryption. That's a bad thing. So we worked equally hard on all the algorithms
that would sustain quantum. I think with chat, okay, great. There's equal, and there are people
working on it, but like, okay, the things that say, hey, I can tell this was written with that,
right? Because the implications on how people learn, right? If this is not a great thing,
if all it does is do your homework, that is not the idea of homework as someone who liked to
study so hard. But anyways, you get my point. It's just the upside and the downside.
And that there could be much larger implications that are much more difficult to predict than
it's our responsibility to really work hard to figure that out.
Yeah, I was talking to AI ethics a decade ago, and I'm like, why won't anybody listen to us?
You know, and it's, that's another one of those values things that you realize, hey,
if I'm going to bring technology in the world, I better bring it safely, right? And that to me
comes with when you're an older company that's been around, you realize that society gave you
a license to operate and it can take it away. And we see that happen to companies. And therefore
you're like, okay, like why I feel so strong about skills. Hey, if I'm going to bring in,
it's going to create all these new jobs, job dislocation, then I should help. I'm trying
to help people get new skills. Anyways, that's a long answer to good tech, but the idea that
there's kind of in retrospect, a set of principles you could look at and maybe learn something from
my sort of rocky road through there. But it started with the power of we, and there's that
big leap, I think that propagates through the things you're saying, which is the leap from
focusing on yourself to the focusing on others. So that having that empathy, you've said at some
point in our lives and careers, our attention turns from ourselves to others. We still have our
own goals, but we recognize that our actions affect many, that it is impossible to achieve
anything truly meaningful alone. So it's to you, I think maybe you can correct me, but ultimate good
power is about collaboration and maybe in a large conference like delegation on great teams.
The ultimate good power is actually doing something for society. That would be my
ultimate definition of good power, by the way. So it's about the results of the thing.
Yeah, but how it's done, right? The how it's done. And so when you said a leap,
do you think people make a leap when they go from thinking about themselves to others?
Do you think it's a leap or do you think it kind of just is a sort of slow point?
I think the leap is in deciding that you will care about others. It's like a leap of going
to the gym for the first time. Yes, it takes a long time to develop that and to actually care,
but the decision that I'm going to actually care about other human beings, yeah.
It just feels like a deliberate action you take of empathy.
Yeah, because sometimes I think it happens a little, it's maybe not as deliberate. Yeah,
it's a little bit more gradual because it might happen because you realize that,
geez, I can't get this done alone. So I got to have other people with me, but how do I
get them to help me do something? So I think it does happen a little bit more gradually.
And as you get more confident, you start to not think so much that it's about you and you start
to think about this other thing you're trying to accomplish. And so that's why I felt it was a
little more gradual. I also felt like I can remember so well this idea that, again, now
we're in the 80s, 90s, I'm a woman, I'm in technology, and I was down in Australia at a
conference and I gave this great speech. Again, me, power of me, I'm thinking I give this great
speech, financial services, this guy walks up to me after I think he's going to ask me some
great question, and he said to me, I wish my daughter could have been here. And in that moment,
and at that point up to then, I'd always been about, look, please don't notice I'm a woman.
Do not notice that. I just want to be recognized for my work. But crossing over from me to we,
like it or not, I was a role model for some number of people. And maybe I didn't want to be,
but that didn't really matter. So I could either accept that and embrace it or not. I think it's a
good example of that transition. I did have a little epiphany with that happening. And then
I'm like, okay, because I would always be like, no, I won't go on a women's conference. I won't
talk here. I won't, you know, no, no, no. But then I sort of realized, wait a second, you know,
that old saying, you cannot be what you cannot see. And I said to myself, what? Oh, wait a second.
Okay. I am in these positions. I have a responsibility to, and it's to others. And that's
what I meant. I felt like it can be somewhat gradual that you come and you may have these like
pivotal moments that you see it, but then you feel it and you sort of move over that transom into the
power of we. You're one of the most powerful tech leaders ever. And as you mentioned, the word
power, you know, the old saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Was there an aspect of power that was, uh, that you had to resist it's ability to corrupt your
mind to, um, to sort of delete, delete you into thinking you're smarter than you are,
that kind of all the ways. That's very dangerous. I agree with, I mean,
I think you got to be careful who you surround yourself with. That's how I would answer that
question. Right. And people who will hold the mirror up to you can be done in a very positive
way, by the way. It doesn't mean, you know, but, uh, that we're sycophants, you cannot have that.
Right. I mean, it's like, I would say to someone like, um, he listened to me tell him, tell me
what would make me better or do something, or I have a husband that'll do that for me quite
easily. By the way, he'll always tell me, I have, I have been surrounded myself with a number of
people that will do that. And I think you have to have that. I had a woman that worked with me for
a very long time and, um, at one time we were competitors. And then at some point she started
to work for me and stayed with me for quite a while. And she was one of the few people that
would tell me the truth in, in, you know, sometimes I'm like enough already. And, and she'd be like,
do not roll your eyes at this. And you absolutely have got to have that. And, and I think it also
comes, it'll go back to my complete commitment to inclusion and diversity. Cause you gotta have that
variety around you. You'll get a better product and a better answer at the end of the day.
And so that, to resist that allure, I think it's around who, about who you surround yourself with.
I, uh, current politics would say that too. So you, uh, you write about, and in general,
you value diversity a lot. So can you speak to almost like philosophically, what does diversity
mean to you? Diversity to me means I'm going to get a better product, a better answer.
I value different views. And so it's inclusion. So I always say inclusion, diversity is a number,
inclusion is a choice and you can make that choice every single day. It's a good line. I really
believe, and I've witnessed it that I've had one of my teams are diverse. I get a better answer.
My friends are diverse. I have a better life. I mean, all these kinds of things. And so, um,
I also believe it's like no silver thread. There's no easy way. You have to authentically
believe it. I mean, do you authentically believe that that diversity is a good thing?
Yeah, but I, I believe that diversity, like broadly, I very broadly define it. Yeah. So like,
there's, you know, sometimes the way diversity is looked at with the way diversity is used today is
like surface level characteristics, which are also important, but they're usually reflective
of something else, which is a diversity of background, a diversity of thought, a diversity of
struggle. Uh, some people that grow up middle-class, uh, versus poor, different countries, different
motivations, all of that. Yeah. It's beautiful. And different people from very different walks of
life get together. Yeah. It's beautiful to see. But like, sometimes it's very difficult to get
at that on a sheet of paper, uh, of, of the characteristics that defines the diversity.
So it is, it's just like, oh, I can't hire exactly for, or if I'm trying to,
and, but I do know one thing that when people say, well, I can't find these kinds of people I'm
looking for, I'm like, you're just not looking in the right places. You have to open up, you
got to really open up new pools. You have to think like everybody, you don't have to have a PhD,
just like you said. I'm sorry to say it, you know, I know, I know it's very valuable, but you have,
trust me, but just like you said, it could even be a negative. So you mentioned, uh, like for
good power, you are a CEO, uh, you were a CEO for a long time of a public company. Were there times
when there was pressure to sacrifice what is good for the world, um, for the bottom line in order to
do what's good for the company? There were a lot of times for that. I mean, I, I, I think every
company faces that today in that, um, I always felt like there's so much discussion about
stakeholder capitalism, right? Do you just serve a shareholder? Do you have multiple?
I have always found, and I've been very vocal about that topic that, um, and I participated
the business round table, wrote up a new purpose statement that had multiple stakeholders.
I think it's common sense. Like if you're going to be a hundred years old, you only get there
because you actually do at some time balance all these different stakeholders and what it is that
you do and short term, longterm, all these trade-offs. And I always say people who write
about it, they write about it black and white, but I have to live in a gray world. Nothing I've
ever done has been in a black and white world, hardly, maybe things of values that I had to
answer, but most of it is gray. And so, um, I think back lots of different decisions. Um,
I think back, which you would well remember you're a student of history. IBM was one of the,
really the originators of the semiconductor industry and certainly of commercializing
the semiconductor industry, great R and D and manufacturing, but it is a game of volume.
And so when I came on, we were still manufacturing R and D and manufacturing our own chips. We were
losing a lot of money yet here we had to fight a war on cloud and AI. And so, okay, now shareholders
would say, fine, shut it down. Okay. Those chips also power some of the most important systems that
power these, the banks of today. If I just shut it down, well, what would that do? And so, okay,
the answer wasn't just stop it. The answer wasn't just keep putting money into it. The answer wasn't,
we had to kind of sit in an uncomfortable spot till we found a way. I mean, it's going to sound
so basic, but you as an engineer understand it. We had to separate, it was a very integrated
process of research development and manufacturing. And you'd also, you'd be perfecting things in
manufacturing. And it's, these were very high performance chips. We had to be able to separate
those. We eventually found a way to do that so that we could, um, take the manufacturing
elsewhere and we would maintain the R and D. It's a, I think it's a great example of the
question you just asked because there was, people would have applauded, others would have been,
this was horrible. Or we had a financial roadmap that had been put in place that said,
I'll make this amount EPS by this date. There came a time we couldn't honor it because we had
to invest. And so there's a million of these decisions. I think most people that run firms,
any size firm, they're just one right after another like that. And you're always making
that short and long tension of what am I giving up? Well, what is that partnership
like with the, with the class? Cause you work with gigantic businesses and what's it like
sort of, um, really forming a great relationship with them, understanding what their needs are,
being in service of their needs. Yeah. Very simple. Honor your promises.
And that happens over time. I mean, in service of, you know, which is often why you could work with
competitors, because if you are really in service of you and you need something, it takes two of us
to do it. That becomes easier to do because I really, we both care. You get what you needed.
And so I can remember, um, during one of the times I was on a European trip and at the time,
a lot of, and this is still true about views about technology and national technology giants and
global ones and the pros and the cons and countries want their own national champions.
Quite obvious. I mean, if I'm France or Germany and, um, there was a lot of discussion about
security and data and who was getting access to what. And I can remember being in one of the,
I was with chancellor Merkel, had met her many times. She very well prepared,
very well prepared every time she would know. And I started to explain all these things about why,
how, you know, how we don't share data, how, who it belongs to. Our systems never had back doors
and she sort of stopped me. Like you're one of the good guys, like stop. Now that wasn't about
me personally. She's talking about a company that's acted consistent with values for decades,
right? So to me, how you work with those big kind of clients is you honor your promises. You, you,
you say what you do when you do what you say and you act with values over a long period of time.
I, and that to me, people say we're valued. It is not a fluffy thing. It is not a fluffy thing. It
is a, I mean, if I was starting a company now, I'd spend a lot of time on that. And, you know,
why we do what we do and why some things are tolerable and something, you know,
what your fundamental beliefs are. And, uh, and many people sort of zoom past that stage, right?
It's okay for a while. And never sacrifice that. You would never sacrifice that. I don't think you
can. So there was a lot of pressure when you took over as CEO and there was 22 consecutive quarters
of revenue decline between 2012 and the summer of 2017. So it was a stressful time. Maybe not,
maybe you can correct me on that. So, uh, as a CEO, what was it like going through that time
with the decisions, the tensions in terms of investing versus, uh, making a profit?
I always felt that that sense of urgency was so high. And even if I was calm on the outside,
because you have one of the world's largest pensions. So, so many people depend on you.
You have a huge workforce. They're depending on you. You have clients whose businesses don't run
if you don't perform, et cetera. And shareholders, of course, right? And so, but I also am really
clear. This was perhaps the largest reinvention IBM ever had to undertake at a board that
understood that. In fact, some people, some of the headlines were like, this is existential,
right? I mean, nobody gives you a right to exist forever and there aren't many texts.
You're the student of it. They are gone. They are all gone. And so if we didn't reinvent ourselves,
we were going to be extinct. And so now, but you're big and it's like changing. What's that
old saying? Can I change the wheels while the train's running or something like that? Or the
engines while the plane's flying. And that's what you have to do. And that took time. And so,
you know, Lex, do I wish it would have been faster? Absolutely. But the team worked so
hard. And in my, in that timeframe, 50% of the portfolio was changed. It's a very large company.
And if you would, I also divested $10 billion of businesses. So if you would look at that
growth rate without divestitures in currency, which now today, everyone talks about currency.
Back then we were the only international guy. Net of divestitures in currency, the growth was flat.
Is flat great? No. But flat for a big transformation? I was really proud of the team
for what they did. That is actually pretty miraculous to have made it through that.
I have my little nephew one day and he would see on TV occasionally when there'd be criticism
and he'd say, uh, you know, anti doesn't, does that make you mad when they talk mean? And I
just looked at him and I said, you know, he says, how do you feel? I said, look,
I'm doing what has to be done. And I happened to be the one there. And if you have great conviction
and I did a great conviction, I knew it was the right thing. I knew it would be needed for IBM to
live at second century. And so, and my successor, they have picked up, gone forward. I mean,
you go back, we did the acquisition of Red Hat. I mean, we had to find our way on cloud, right?
We were late to it. So we had to find our way. And eventually that led us to hybrid cloud.
We did a lot of work with Red Hat back in 2017. Oh, we'd always done a lot of work with them.
Actually, we were one of the first investors when they were first formed.
But that was 2018. You know, we took quite a hit for even, you know, oh, it was the largest to then
software acquisition ever. But it is the foundation, right, of what is our hybrid cloud
play today and doing very, very well. So, but I had to take a short-term hit for that, right?
Short-term hit for a very large $34 billion acquisition. But it was, for all of us,
it was the right thing to do. So I think when you get really centered on, you know what's the right
thing to do. You just keep going, right? So the team had the vision, they had the belief,
and everything else, the criticism. So don't, we didn't always have exactly the right, you know,
this wasn't a straight arrow. But stay down. You know you're right. Keep going. Okay, made a mistake.
You know, there's no bad mistake as long as you learn from it, right? And keep moving. So yes,
did it take longer? But we are the largest that was there. Could you maybe just on a small tangent
educate me a little bit? So Red Hat originally is Linux, open source distribution of Linux,
but it's also consulting. Well, it's a little bit of consulting, but it's mostly software district.
It's mostly Linux. It was mostly software. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So but today, IBM is very
much this, you know, services, most IT services in the world is done by IBM. There's so many,
so many varied. So basically, if you have issues, problems to solve in business,
in the software space, IBM can help. Yes. And so in that my last year, our services business,
we broke it into two pieces. And one piece was spun off into a company called Kindrel,
which is managed outsourcing, keeping things running, and they're off creating their own
company. What IBM then retained is really the part I built with PWCC, the big consulting arm.
And so today, the IBM of today in 2023 is, you know, at least ending 2022 was 30% consulting
and the other 70% would be what would you consider software cloud AI. So hybrid cloud and AI is the
other and some hardware, obviously, still the mainframe is modernized, alive and kicking,
and still running some of the most important things of every bank you can think of practically
in the world. And so that is the IBM of today versus perhaps, you know, and Red Hat is a big
piece and an important part of that software portfolio. And they had some services with them
for implementation, but it wasn't a very large part. And it's grown by leaps and bounds,
you know, because originally the belief was everything was going to go to the public cloud.
And at least many people thought that way. We didn't. In fact, I mean, we tried. We cured a
public cloud company. We really tried to work it. But what we found was a lot of the mission
critical work, it was tuned for consumer world. It wasn't tuned for the enterprise.
So then time is lapsing here though, and you gotta be at scale. And we didn't have any application.
Remember, we're not an application company. So it wasn't like we had an office. We didn't have
anything that like pulled things out to the cloud. And so as we look for what our best,
what we really back to who you are, we really know mission critical work. We know where it
lives today and we know how to make it live on the cloud, which led us down hybrid cloud. You know,
that belief that the real world would turn into, there'll be things on traditional that'll never
move because it doesn't make sense. There'll be private clouds for, you know, have all the
benefit of the cloud, but they just don't have, you know, infinite expansion. And then there'll
be public clouds and you're going to have to connect them and be secure. And that's what
took us down the path with Red Hat, that belief. The structure of that is fundamentally different
than something that's consumer facing. So the lesson you learn there is you can't just reuse
something that's optimized for consumers. Very interesting point. It doesn't mean consumer
companies can't move up in the enterprise because obviously they have, right? But I think it's very
hard to take something from the enterprise and come on down because it's got to be simple,
consumable, all the things we talked about already. Plus you have to have the relationships
with enterprise. Yeah. Very different. Yeah. I mean, you know, our history, right? At one time
we had the PC business and you know, the short answer to why would we would not do that is it's
a consumer facing business. We were good at the enterprise and that consumer business, A,
highly competitive, got to be low cost. All the things that are not the same muscles necessarily
of being in an innovation driven, you know, uh, technology business. Yeah. But what is now Lenovo?
I guess that's what's been extremely good at that. So, but not as good as you're saying is that
an enterprise or it's not, it was very good at their PC world. Yes, but I wouldn't. And they
can sell into the enterprise, right? But you as a consumer can go buy a Lenovo too. So look at
look in China, right? Look in other places. So, um, that's what I mean by a consumer, you know,
an end device. And that was a big decision because it would have been one of the last things that had
our logo on it that sits in your hands. Right. So when a new generation says, well, what does IBM do?
Right. Was that a difficult decision? Um, this is a long time ago now. It's like 2005. Yeah. So,
um, they're all difficult because it's not only things as people. Um, but it's back to knowing
who you are is how I would sum that up as right. And we were never great at making a lot of money
at that. And you can remember Virginia's IBM PC, then the IBM clones, or they even called IBM
clones back then, um, as the field became highly, highly competitive and as things commoditized,
we often, as they commoditized, we would move them out and move on to the next innovation level.
But because of that, it's not as public facing, even though it's one of the most
recognizable logos ever. Yeah. Isn't it true? That is very true. That is actually a very
important point. And that is, you know, branding, as you say, one of the most recognizable in a,
in a very highly ranked brand strength around the world. And so that's a trade-off. I mean,
I can't, you know, it, cause there was a time you'd have something of IBM in your home or,
or right. Or cash register as an example, you'd walk into a store. Actually, they're still in
places that went to Toshiba. Can you speak to consulting a little bit? What does that entail
to train up, to hire a workforce that can be of service to all kinds of different problems in the
software space, in the tech space? What's entailed in that? I mean, you have to value a different
set of things, right? And so you've got to always stay ahead. It's about hiring people who are
willing to learn. It is about, um, at the same time, in my view, it's what really drives you
to be customer centric. Maybe you can educate me. I think consulting is a kind of, you roll in
and you try to solve problems that businesses have, like with expertise, right? Okay. Is that,
is that the process of consulting? Somewhat, right? So there, that, okay. So fair enough.
When you say that we're consulting, it's a really broad spectrum. I mean, I think people could be
sitting here thinking it does any, it could be, I just give advice and I leave to all the way to,
I run your systems, right? And I think it's, it's generally people use the word to cover everything
in that, in that space. So we sort of fit in the spot, which is we would come in and live at that
intersection of business and technology. So yeah, we could give you recommendations and then we'd
implement them and see them through because we have the technology to go to the implementation
and see them through. And at the time back then, that's what, you know, there'd been five of those
that had failed, that the companies had bought other consulting firms. And so we were, okay,
that was the great thing about, I mean, the harrowing thing about it was here, please go
work on this. None of the others have ever succeeded before. And yet on the other hand,
the great promise was you could really, clients were dying at that time when we were doing that
to get more value out of their technology and have it really changed the way the business worked.
So I think of it as how do we improve business and apply technology and see it all the way through.
That's what we do today still. Yeah, the see it all the way through. Yes. So let me say almost
like a personal question. So that was a big thing you were a part of that you led in 2002 that you
championed and helped, I should say, negotiate the purchase of one day, the consulting arm
of PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. So what were some of the challenges of that
that you remember? Personal and business. At that time, PW had to really had to divest. And so
they were in parallel going to IPO, right? So we sort of swept in at that point and said,
and we'd been thinking about it a long time and started to work on that as an acquisition. So,
you know, kind of balancing which way would they go IPO or acquisition. And so the challenges are
obvious. And part of it's why they went with us as an acquisition. Big difference to be a private
firm than a public firm. Very big. I can remember one of the guys, you know, he asked somebody how
long you've been with IBM and the person answered 143 quarters. Okay. That's a little enlightening
about a business model, right? So we had the challenges of being private versus public.
You have the challenge of when you acquire something like that, as I say, you acquire
hearts, not parts. They could leave. I mean, you could destroy your value by them leaving.
They can walk right out the door. I mean, yes, you can put, you know, lots of restraints,
but still that you have there. And then we had to really build a new business model that people
and clients would, you know, see as valuable and be willing to pay for. And so we had to do
something that lived at that intersection and say that how this was unique is what we were doing. So
you had the people aspect. You had that they were going to be private and they had, or public,
and they had always been private their whole life. And then you had the business model. So,
and the others, it all failed that had tried to do this. So yeah, it was a, it was, it was a
tough thing to do. What about the personal side of that? That was a big leap step up for you.
You've been at IBM for a long time. Yeah. This is, this is a big sort of leadership,
like very impactful, large scale leadership decisions. What was that like? So, you know,
unlike in my career earlier where I said I was changing jobs, I said I wasn't comfortable,
et cetera. So now here, fast forward 10 years and I'm like, okay, honestly, how I felt inside
on one hand, I did what I learned, like inventory what you know how to do. Like you have some good
strengths that could work here. The other part of me said, boy, this is really high profile.
And I felt, and I can remember saying to someone like, this is going to kill me
or catapult, probably nothing in between. And that wasn't terrifying to you. That was okay.
You were okay with that kind of pressure. I was okay with that because I felt I knew enough,
you know, like these things I had, and I'll tell you the one thing I felt I knew the best.
Consultants of any worth their weight, they really do care that they deliver for an end client.
And, and I felt I understood service to a client so well that what it meant to really provide value.
So I knew we would have like something at, I knew the PWC people more than anything wanted
to deliver value to those clients they had next to then developing their people, that those were
like the really two things and that I could, and I also knew they felt they could do better if they
had more technology and we did so. So there really was a reason, you know, that I could really
believe in. So I authentically believed back to that point. And I also felt I had built some of
those skills to be able to do that. But I wouldn't call it terrifying, but make no mistake Lex,
it was very hard and it was, it turned out to be extremely successful. By the time we ended,
it was worth 19 and a half, by the time I stepped, I ran it for, oh goodness gracious,
quite a long time. I'm going to say seven or eight, nine years. And we were 19 and a half
billion dollars. It made 2.7 billion in profit. It was very consequential to IBM. But the fact
that it was consequential is also very, I mean, there was a time as we moved through it, I can
even remember it. We just weren't meeting the goals as fast as we should. And some of it was
clients were like, oh, now you're IBM. So it means some things I knew would happen, but they happen
so much faster. It'd be things like clients would say, oh, IBM cares about a quarter. So let's
negotiate every quarter on these prices. And you know, when they were private, they didn't have
these issues. Well, that had an impact on margins really fast. And so that ability, you pick them up
right away. And I thought, oh boy, I mean, if I don't get this turned around, this is really a
problem. And the team learned a lot of lessons. I mean, I learned people I had to move out,
that I learned that when people don't believe they can do something, they probably won't do it.
So we wanted to run the business at a certain level. I really did have some great leaders,
but they didn't really believe it could do that. And I finally had to come to terms with,
if you don't really believe in something, you really aren't going to probably make it happen
at the end of the day. And so we would change that. We would have to actually get some more
help to help us undoing. But then it turned. And I can remember the day that we started
really getting the business to hum and start to, it was almost like finally. And I gave the team
this little plaque, this little kind of corny paperweight thing. And I'm going to believe it.
Remember it was Thomas Edison. And he said, many of life's greatest failures are people who gave up
right before they were going to be successful. And it's so true. I mean, there was also a governor
of Texas who's passed, but she had said, someone said, what's the secret of your success? And she
said, it's passion and perseverance when everyone else would have given up. And I feel that's what
that taught me. That taught me like, no matter how bad this gets, you are not giving up. And this,
now you can't keep doing the same thing like the doctor, this hurts. Oh, then stop doing it.
You can't keep doing the same thing. We had to keep changing till we found our right way
to get the model to work right. And client work, we never, never had an issue and kept so many of
the people. And now we are 25 years almost later. And a number of them run parts of the IBM business
still today. So it's that old Maya Angelou saying, when you say, what do I remember?
They'll say, you won't remember the specifics of this, but you'll remember how you felt. And
that's kind of how I feel. And I think they do too, the whole team does of that. Like,
I'll get anniversary notes still on that. You know, when you've been through something like
that together with people. So during the acquisition, the way you knew that people,
it's the right team, are the ones that could believe that this consulting business can grow,
can integrate with IBM and all that. Yeah, I was lucky. Look, I did things that helped that. I
mean, I knew that people joining us would feel more comfortable if they had people leading it,
that they recognized, etc. But again, I learned those that didn't then I eventually had to take,
you know, some action out. But PWCC had a lot of really dedicated leaders to it,
and I give them a lot of credit. Well, it's amazing to see a thing that kind of start at that
that very stressful time, and then it turns out to be a success. Yeah, that's just beautiful to see.
So what about the acquisition itself? Is there something interesting to say about the, like,
what you learned about maybe negotiation? Because there's a lot of money involved too.
To me, it was a win-win, and we both actually cared that customers got value. So there was this,
like, third thing that had a benefit, not them. There was this third thing.
And then next to that, people would have the wisdom or what it takes to have great negotiation.
But yeah, so it's a win-win is one of the ways you can have success. But it's like obvious to
even say that, right? I mean, if you can, back to being in service of something, we were both
in service of clients. So in and then, you know, I always say, when you have a negotiation with
someone, okay, both parties always kind of walk away a little bit. Okay, that's good.
If they both walk away going, yeah, I should have got a little bit more. Okay, but it's okay.
Okay, they're both a little fussy. When one walks away and thinks they did great and the
other one did horrible, they're usually, like, born bad. I mean, because they never worked that
way. And I've always felt that way with negotiations, that you push too far down,
you usually will be sorry you did that, you know? So don't push too far. I mean,
that's ultimately what collaboration and empathy means is you're interested in long-term success
of everybody together versus, like, your short-term success. And then you get the
discretionary energy from them versus, like, okay, you screwed me here. I'm done, right?
So let's even rewind even back. Oh, no. Oh, no. Do you feel like this is a nostalgia interview?
Oh, no. Let me just ask the romantic question. What did you love most about engineering,
computer science, electrical engineering, in those early days from your degree to the early work?
I love that logic part of it, right? And you do get a sense of completion at some point when you
reach certain milestones that, you know, like, yes, it worked or yes, you know, that finite
answer to that. So that's what I loved about it. I loved the problem solving of it.
Computing, what led you down that path with computing in general? What made you fall in love
with computing, with engineering? It's probably that back to that desire,
wanting to know how things work, right? And so that's like a natural thing. You know, math,
I loved math for that reason. I always wanted to study how did that, you know, how did it get that
to work kind of thing. So it goes back in that time. But I did start when I started at Northwestern.
I wasn't, I was already in the engineering school, but my first thought was to be a doctor,
that that was far more noble, that I should be a medical doctor until I could not pass human
reproduction as a course. And I thought the irony that I could not, I'm like, I got all these colored
pencils. I got these pictures. This is not working. I'm going to stick to math. It was the only course
in my four year college education. I had to take pass fail because otherwise I, I risked, you know,
impairing my, uh, my, my grade point average engineering. It is so, but after about 10 years,
you jumped from the technical role of systems engineer to a management, a leadership role.
Did you miss at that time the sort of the technical direct contribution versus being a
leader, a manager? That's an interesting point. Like I, like I say, I've always been sort of a
doer leader, you know, so you never lost that. I never really did. Even, you know, and I think
this is really important for today. The best way people learn is experientially. I think,
you know, you may, that's being a generalization because there are people can learn all different
ways, right? So I've done things like with my whole team, they all had to learn how to build
cloud applications and called it code off. And so, you know, I don't care what your job is,
write code, you know? And, uh, I remember when we were trying to get the company to understand AI,
we did something called a cognitive jam. Okay. There's a reason we picked the word cognitive,
by the way, instead of AI. Today, we use the word AI. It was really symbolic. It was to mean
this is to help you think, not replace your thinking. There was so much in the zeitgeist
about AI being a bad thing at that time. So that was why we picked a mouthful of a word like
cognitive. And it was like, no, no, this is to help you actually. So do what, you know, do what
you do better or do something you haven't yet learned. And, uh, we did something called the
cognitive jam, but the whole point was everybody in the company could volunteer, get on a team.
You either had to build something that improved one of our products or did something for a client
or did a social, self-dissolved social issue with AI. And again, this goes back now,
10 years? And people did things from bullying applications to, you know, railroad stuff to
whatever it was, but it got like 100,000 people to understand, you know, viscerally what is AI.
So that's a long answer to my belief around experiential. And so do you ever give it up?
I don't think so. Cause I actually think that's pretty good to get your hands dirty in something
that you can't do it, you know, depending what you're doing, your effort to do that will be less,
but so even a CEO, you try to always get your hands dirty. I've played, I mean, you still,
I'm not saying I'm any good at any of it, you know, anymore, but to build up intuition. Yeah.
It's that really understand, right? And not be afraid of. Yeah. Like I, we mentioned at the
beginning, IBM research has helped catalyze some of the biggest accomplishments in computing and
artificial intelligence history. So D blue, IBM D blue versus Kasparov chess match in 96 and 97.
Just, just to ask kind of like what your perception is, what your memory is of it.
What is, what is that moment? Like this seminal moment, I believe probably one of the greatest
moments in AI history when the machine first beat a human at a thing that humans do. You
make a very interesting point because it is like one of the first demonstrations of using a game
to like bring something to people's consciousness. Right. And to this day, people use games,
right. To demonstrate different things. Um, but at the time, it's funny. I didn't necessarily think
of it so much as AI and I'll tell you why I was, and I'm not a chess player. You might be a chess
player, so I'm not expert at it, but I think I understand properly of chess that chess has got
a finite number of moves that can be made. Therefore, if it's finite, really what's a
demonstration of a supercomputing, right? It's about the amount of time and how fast it can
crunch through to find the right move. So in some ways I thought of it as almost a bigger
demonstration of that, but it is absolutely, as you said, it is, was a motivator, one of the big
milestones of AI because it put in your consciousness that it's man in this other machine,
right? Doing something. So you saw it as just a challenging competition problem and this is a way
to demonstrate hardware and software computation at its best. Yes, I did. But the thing is there
is a romantic notion that chess is the embodiment of human intellect. I mean, intelligence that you
can't build a machine that can beat a chess champion in chess. And the fact that I was
blessed by not being a chess expert. It's just a computation problem. It's a computation problem
to me. Well, that's probably required to not be paralyzed by the immensity of the task.
So that this is just solvable, but it was a very, very, I think that was a powerful moment. So
speaking just as an AI person that was, that reinvigorated the dream. You were a little kid
back then though, right? At 95? You had to be like, were you, you remember it actually at the moment?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you think at the moment about it?
It was awe-inspiring because, especially sort of growing up in the Soviet Union,
you think, especially with Garry Kasparov and chess, like your intuition is weak about those
things. I didn't see it as computation. I thought of it as intelligence because chess for a human
being doesn't feel like computation. It feels like some complicated relationship between memory and
patterns and intuition and guts and instinct and all of those. If you watch someone play,
that's what you would conclude, right? And so to see a machine be able to beat a human,
I mean, you get a little bit of that with Chad GPT now. It's like language was to us humans,
the thing that we kind of, surely the poetry of language is something only humans can really have.
It's going to be very difficult to replicate the magic of a natural language without deeply
understanding language. But it seems like Chad GPT can do some incredible things with language
and natural language dialogue. But that was the first moment in AI. They're all the AI winters
from the 60s of the promise of the, it was, wow, this is possible for a simple set of algorithms
to accomplish something that we think of as intelligence. So that was truly inspiring that
maybe intelligence, maybe the human mind is just algorithms. That was the thought at the time.
And of course, now, the funny thing, what happens is the moment you accomplish it, everyone says,
oh, it's just brute force algorithms. It's silly. And this continues every single time you pass a
benchmark, a threshold to win a game. People say, oh, well, it's just this, it's just this,
it's just this. And that, I think that's funny. And there's going to be a moment when we're going
to have to contend with AI systems that exhibit human-like emotions and feelings, and you have to
start to have some difficult discussions about, well, how do we treat those beings and what role
do they have in society? What are the rules around that? And this is really exciting because that
also puts a mirror to ourselves to see, okay, what's the right way to treat each other as human
beings? Because it's a good test for that. It is because I always say it's a reflection of
humanity. I mean, it's taught by what man, for bad stuff in the past, you'll teach it bad stuff for
the future, which is why I think efforts to regulate it are a fool's errand. You need to
regulate uses, because it's not the technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but how it's
used or taught can be good or bad for sure, right? And so that's, to me, will unveil now a whole
different way of having to look at technology. What about another magical leap with the early
days of Watson with beating the Jeopardy Challenge? What was your experience like
with Watson and what's your vision for Watson in general? And it was really inspired by
first chess, right, and Kasparov, and then you come forward in time. And I think what Watson did,
because you used a really important word, AI had kind of waxed and waned in these winners, right?
In and out, in and out, popular not, more money, less money, you know, in and out, confidence,
no confidence. And so I think that was one of the first times it brought to the forefront of
people like, whoa, like it humanized it, because here it is playing against these two gentlemen.
And as you did lose it first, you know, and then finally, finally won at the end of the day. And
what it was doing is making you say, hey, natural language, it's actually understanding natural
language. It's one of the first demonstrations of natural language support and a bit of reasoning
over lots of data, right? And so that it could have access to a lot of things, come up with a
conclusion on it. And to me, that was a really big moment. And I do think it brought to the
conscience of the public, and in good ways and bad, because it probably set expectations very
high of like, whoa, what this could be. But, and I still do believe that it has got the ability
to change and help us, man, make better decisions, that so many decisions are not optimal in this
world, you know, even medical decisions. And it's right or wrong what took us down a path
of healthcare first with our AI. And we took many pivots. And I think there's a really valuable
lesson in what we learned. One is that I actually don't think the challenges are the technology,
yes, those are challenges, but the challenges are the people challenges around this, right?
So do people trust it? How will they use it? I mean, I saw that straight up with the doctors
and like, meaning they're so busy in the way they've been taught to do something. Do they
really have time to learn another way? I saw it was a mistake when you put it on top of processes
that didn't change, kind of like paving a cow path, didn't work. I mean, it was all human change
management around it that were really its biggest challenges. And another valuable lesson we picked
back to you, Sid, you think of IBM as moonshops, we picked really hard problems to start with.
I think you see a lot of technology now starts with really simple problems. And by that,
it probably starts to build trust because I start little. It's like, oh, I'm not ready to,
you know, outsource my diagnosis to you, but I'll get some information here about a test question.
So very different thinking. So a lot of things to learn. We were making a market at the time.
And when you make a market, you know, choice of problem you work on gets to be very important.
When you're catching up, well, then it's a scale game. So very different thing. And so,
but Watson proved, I think, I mean, I hope I'm not being too, I think Watson brought AI back out
a winner for the world. And that since then, there's just been, you know, one company after
another and innovations and people working on it. And I have no regrets of anything that we did.
We learned so much. I mean, we probably rebuilt it many times over. It made it more modular.
And today to IBM, Watson is more about AI inside of a lot of things. If you think of it that way,
which is more like an ingredient versus it's a thing in and of itself. And I think that's how
it'll bring its real value, you know, more as an ingredient and it's so badly needed. And even back
then the issue was so much data. Like what do you ever do it? You can't get through it. You can't
use it for anything. You know this well, it's your profession. So we have to have it. So that's
going to propel it forward. So it's part of the suite of tools that you use when you go to
enterprise and you try to solve problems. Yeah. So AI for security, AI and automated operations,
AI in your robotics, AI on your factory floor, you know what I mean? It's, it's all part of,
and I think, and that's why even to this day, thousands, I mean, thousands and thousands of
clients of IBM still have the Watson components that it's the AI being used. So it became a
platform is how I would say it, right? And an ingredient that went inside and consultants,
like you said, had to learn. I had, they had to learn, don't just put it on something. You
got to rethink how that thing should work because with the AI, it could work entirely differently.
And so I also felt it could open up and still will open up jobs to a lot of people because more like
an assistant and it could help me be qualified to do something. And we, we even years ago saw
this with the French banks, very unionized, but that idea that you could, in this case,
the unions voted for it because it felt people did a better job. And so, and that's just part
about being really dedicated to help it help humanity, not destroy it. Speaking of which,
a funny side note, uh, so Kubrick's, uh, uh, 2001 Space Odyssey, uh, what do you think about,
you know, the fact that how 9,000, uh, was named after IBM? I really don't think it was. I know
there's, I really don't. I've often, it could be more fake news. It's more fake news. I have done,
I've like researched this, tried to find any evidence and people have talked to, you know,
was it really, you know, one letter, it was one letter, one letter off, right? People don't know
H is one letter off of I, A is one letter off of B, and then L is one letter off of,
that was the, I think that's a solution found afterwards, you know, but here's what I think
it more was. I do think it's one of the early demonstrations of evil AI. Yeah. Like can be
taught bad. I could push back on that because it's presented as evil in the movie because it hurts,
the AI hurts people, but it's a really interesting ethical question because the role of how 9,000
is, um, to carry out a successful mission. And so the question that is a human question,
it's not an AI question at what, what, what price you humans wage war. They, they're,
they pay very heavy costs for, um, for, for a vision, for a goal of a future that creates
a better world. And so that's the question certainly in space. Doctors ask that question
all the time under limited resources, who do I allocate my time and money and efforts?
I agree. I, like I said, I've spent a decade talking about this question of AI ethics, right?
And that, that it needs really considerable, not just attention, because otherwise it will mirror
everything we love and everything we don't love. And again, in that sense, beauty in the eye of
beholder, right? Depending on your culture and everything else with what you're doing and what
you're going to do, how do you think about it? Do you think about the AI you're going to develop
as having guardrails dictated by some of your beliefs or, uh, yeah, for sure. So there's,
there's so many interesting ways to do this the right way. And I don't think anyone has an answer.
I tend to believe that transparency is really important. So I think some aspect of your work
should be open sourced, uh, or at least have an open source competitor that creates kind of
forcing function for transparency of how you do things. So, um, the other is I tend to believe
maybe it's because of the podcast and I've just talked to a lot of people. You should know the
people involved. I agree a hundred percent. As opposed to hide behind a company wall.
Sometimes there's a pressure. You have a PR team and you have to care for investors and discussions
so on. Let's protect. Let's surely not tweet. Not like you form this bubble where you have
incredible engineers doing fascinating work and also doing work that's a difficult, complex human
questions being answered. And we don't know about any of them as a society. And so we can't really
have that conversation, even though that conversation would be great for hiring. It
would be great for revealing the complexities of what the company is facing. So when the company
makes mistakes, you understand that it wasn't a malevolence or half acidness and the decision
making is just a really hard problem. And so I think transparency is just good for everybody.
And I mean, in general, just having a lot of public conversations about this is serious stuff.
It's, uh, that AI will have a transformative impact on our society and it might do so very,
very quickly through all kinds of ways we're not expecting, which is social media recommendation
systems. They're at scale have impact on the way we think, on the way we consume news and
our growth, like the kind of stuff we consume to grow and learn and become better human beings,
all of that. That's all AI. And then obviously the tools that run companies on which we depend,
the infrastructure in which we depend, we need to know all about those AI decisions.
And it's not as simple as, well, we don't want the AI to say these specific set of bad things is
unfortunately, I don't believe it's possible to prevent evil or, uh, bad things by creating a
set of cold mathematical rules. Unfortunately, it's all fuzzy and gray areas. It's all a giant
mess. It is. I mean, you think about it like a knife, a knife can do good and a knife can do bad.
Okay. You can't, it's very hard. You can't ban knives. And that this is, I think back,
it was probably 20, I don't know, 15, 16, we did principles of trust and transparency. Notice the
word transparency, that belief that with AI, it should be explainable. You should know who taught
it. You should know the data that went into training it. You should know who, how it was
written. If it's being used, you have a right to know these things. And I think those are pretty
to this day, really powerful principles to be followed. Right. And, and part of it,
we ended up writing, cause here we were when we were working on particularly healthcare, like,
okay, you care who trained it in what and, and where did, and that's, that's sort of simple,
you know, that comes to your mind and you're like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense for something
important like that. But it just, in general, people won't trust the technologies. I don't
think unless they have transparency into those things. In the end, they won't really trust it.
I think a lot of people would like to know sort of, cause a lot, a lot of us, I certainly do
suffer from imposter syndrome, that self-critical brain. So, you know, taking that big step into
leadership, did you, did you at times suffer from imposter syndrome? Like how did I get here? Do I
really belong here? Or did you, were you able to summon the courage and sort of the confidence to
really step up? I think that's very natural for someone. Like no matter, like the bigger the job
gets, you turn and you look to the left and the right and you see people around you and you think,
what am I doing here? Right. But then you remember what you do and there's no one else doing it.
And so you get that confidence. So I do hear a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome, right.
And I kind of, actually this past year I've spent some time helping people on that topic. And part
of it starts with, you have to believe you, you have a right to be there like anyone else does,
if you've prepared for that moment, you know. And so it's a bit more of a, I know it's hard to say
it, like a confidence thing more than anything else. So yes, there are times I look around,
but then I think, wow, I'm in a position to make something change. So I can't say I have ever
really dwelled on that feeling for long. Okay, so you're just focusing on the work,
I have an opportunity. You know, it's good or bad, I just focus on the work. Yeah, good or bad.
Yeah. One important lesson you said you learned from your mom is never let anyone else define you,
only you define who you are. So what's the trajectory, let's say, of your self-definition
journey, of you discovering who you are, from having that very difficult upbringing?
You know, they say pivotal moments happen and you don't realize it when they're happening.
So most of my, I feel like most of my self-discovery, it's been like something
happens in a year or two or some number later, I look back on it and say, you know, I learned
this from that. It's like not in the moment always with me. That could just be how I am. So
I feel like it's been, know yourself, it's a good thing, right? I've actually heard you say that on
different podcasts when you ask people questions, you're like, well, it depends, you know, like,
know yourself a bit, right? It's hard to know who you are, though. There's a lot of things
like you said, like, for me, there's moods when you're super self-critical, sometimes
you're super confident, and there's many, sometimes you're emotional, sometimes you're cool under
pressure, and all those are the same human being. Yeah, and I think that's fine.
Self-awareness, that's different.
Was there societal expectations and norms regarding gender that you felt in your career?
You've spoken to that a little bit, but was there some aspect of that that was constraining,
empowering, or both? You know, I chose to never look at it, okay? Now whether that is right or
wrong, and again, I'm a product of the 70s, and 70s and the 80s where I think I was surrounded,
all the other women around me viewed our way to get ahead was just to work hard. Work hard,
work hard, and that was the way you differentiated yourself, and that's obvious it did help. I mean,
there's no doubt about it. You're always, you know, you've learned a lot of things,
which qualified, opened up another door, opened up another door. I'm very
mindful that I have worked for companies that are very steeped in those values of equal opportunity,
and so nothing remarkable about that. I mean, when I was a wee kid, I'm taught,
hire a diverse team. I get evaluated for it. I get evaluated if my team has built up their skills.
So this is that, you know, when you're really formative, you're in a culture that that's what
it's valuing, right? So it becomes part of you. So I say sometimes to chagrin, did I ever feel I
was held back for that reason? Now, were there plenty of times when, you know, I write about
a few stories in the book, I'm laying cables at night and the guys are at the bar. Now,
I didn't really want to go with them to the bar anyways. They'd be like, we'll be back to get you,
you know, bye. And I'm like, okay. I mean, I learned a lot. So it didn't. Now, all that said,
back to my earlier story about being a role model, you know, it would be foolish to not believe that
there were times that that mattered. And I would say two things, even not that long ago, you know,
a colleague called me and I was talking about media and about women CEOs and said, do you
notice that sometimes when it's a woman CEO, they call the person by name. And when it's a man,
they call the company out, not the person's name exactly associated with the issue. And I said,
yeah, well, I think you have to just understand much of what you do, it will be magnified because
there are so few of you. And sometimes it will be, you know, really can be blown out of proportion,
right? And so that can happen and you got to learn which, in which way. Now, all that said
on gender, it is an interesting thing with the book as I've talked to, you know, having a book,
even some of my best friends, the first question is, I can't wait for my daughter to read it.
I say, well, that's interesting. Do you think you could read it?
Yeah, it's fascinating.
It's an interesting reaction. And here I am 40 years later, that's an interesting reaction,
right? And I say, no, the book, I really worked hard to write it for everyone. I just happened
to be a woman, right? But there's still that there. And so look, until I think people see
and never feel that they have a, it doesn't even matter whether there's a woman, it could be
another diverse group that feels it. It's okay to ask those questions. And that's why actually,
I'm okay talking about it. Because there were times I felt it, right? There were times in my
life on my looks or my weight or my clothing or endless numbers of things that people would
comment on, that they would not have commented on, if it was someone else. Now, on the other
hand, when there's so few of you, and, you know, in, there's good and bad. I mean, there's benefit
to that too, right? You, if you do good work, you'll be recognized, it's easier to be recognized.
And so a pro and a con, and I think, I've just, you know, grown up believing like my advice to
young women, go into engineering, not because you're gonna be an engineer, it teaches you to
solve problems. And anything new job you do is gonna be solving problems. Things like that are
what I take away from that in that journey. It is interesting that, you know, I hear from women
that, even on this podcast, when I talk to incredible women like yourself, it is inspiring
to young women to hear. I mean, you like to see, you talk to somebody from Turkey, and then Turkish
people all get excited. It's so true. So you get like somebody that looks like you, somebody that,
and the category could be tiny, or it could be, it can be huge. That's just the reality of the world.
It is the reality of the world. And I, the work I do now to put this group called 110,
put 1 million black employees into the middle class without college degrees. Get them the
right skills, upwardly mobile jobs. So one of my last years, we had been working on,
it just did regular leadership session at IBM and had our black colleagues were talking about,
what did it feel like to be a black leader? And here, these are extremely accomplished people.
And I can remember very well when telling a story about, look, I felt if I failed or succeeded,
it's not just me. It came from a country in Africa. I felt like the whole country is on my shoulder,
my success or failure. That's a burden. I mean, like, I don't feel that burden. Not true. As a
woman CEO, I did feel like, you know, even the headlines when I was named said, you know,
her appointment will either, you know, her success or failure will be a statement for the whole
gender kind of thing. And I didn't dwell on it, but I meant that's, but I could see how people,
like you said, it could be a small group, could be whatever. And so that is a lot of pressure on
people and they need role models. You are a role model for people. Look at what you're able to do.
You do these podcasts, you understand your science very well. You're very well prepared.
Your ability to translate it to people, you know, that's not an insignificant thing. And you may
think, oh, you know, is that about the power of me? Not really. Right. And you obviously believe
you don't do this because you just like sitting at a microphone. You do it because you think, okay,
if I can get people to say things that are really valuable to other people, they're going to learn
something. I assume that is, I mean, you never told me my interpretation is that's why you do
this podcast, that you feel like in service of other people, that you can bring them something
unique by the way you do this. Now I should ask you, why do you do it? That's my impression.
By the way, can I just comment on the fact that you keep asking me really hard questions?
I really appreciate it. I'm really honored by it. As a fan of podcasts myself,
what I hope is to talk to people like you and to show that you are a fascinating and
beautiful human being outside of your actual accomplishments also. So sometimes people are very
focused on, you know, very specific things about, like you said, science, like what the actual
work is, whether it's nuclear fusion or it's GPT. I just want to show that it's, because I see it
at MIT and everywhere, it's just human beings trying their best, they're flawed,
but just realizing that all of these very well accomplished people are all the same.
Yeah, that's a very good, well said.
And then so then regular people and the young people, they're able to see, you know,
I can do this too. I can have a very big impact.
Yeah, exactly. It's like we're all kind of imposters. We're all like trying to figure it out.
To a certain degree.
So let me just ask you about family. You wrote that my family still jokes that the reason I
never had children on my own was because I had already raised my family. They're right. So this
is talking to your upbringing, but in general, what was your, you know, leading a giant company,
what was the right place to find a work-life balance for you to have time for family,
have time for away from work and be successful?
So I had to learn that. And I might've said, you know, you're the only one that can determine your
own work-life balance. Companies are innate things. I mean, they will take everything they
can from you. And it's not a bad thing. They just will, as will bosses. I mean, you give it,
we'll take it. And when people ask for, you know, I need roof, I'm like, okay,
I had to come with terms with the criminal was me. If I needed that balance, I had to set those
boundaries. And so when I comment about a family, because I am in extreme awe of people with
children who work, it is a extremely hard thing to do. I watch my siblings. I love my nieces and
nephews and who, you know, a, the emotional, their pain is your pain every minute of a day.
And then you still have a job on top of it. And so when my mom had to go back to school and had
to work, I was the one. And so when she couldn't go to the teacher meeting, I went to the teacher
meeting when, and so in some ways, and there's an age gap between my brother and I and my other two
sisters. And so I'm still, they, they still call me mama bear even. I mean, I I'm extremely
protective of all of them. And it is as if I had raised them and my mom did a great job raising
them. I didn't, I, but I was there. And so when it came time to have children and my husband came
from a family where his father died and was raised by a single mother, very, very similar endpoint,
different reasons why he ended up, you know, his father did not abandon them. And I don't want
people to believe to do my job, you can have no children. That is not right. I know other great
women CEOs, uh, Marilyn Houston, who ran Lockheed Martin, extremely technical company, Mary Barra,
who runs General Motors, Ellen Coleman, who run DuPont. These are all my friends to this day.
And they've been fantastic mothers and husbands, good parents, right? And so I talk about it
because it was a choice we made. And so, you know, we both felt, look, we'd reached a point where,
for his reasons, what he had to do, I'd already felt that way. And that we were comfortable just
being great aunts and uncles. And I'm a great aunt, you know, I, well, I like to think that
for my little guys and all, and they're older now, but lots of them. And there's no doubt though,
the choices we made, Mark and I, that that made it easier for me to focus on work. I mean,
it's just math, you know, when you've got less people to have to take care of. And so I'm very
considerate of that. And I think much of it informed many of the policies I put into because
I had such great empathy for those who then still had these other responsibilities. And I desperately
wanted them all to stay in the workforce. So I can remember, and my siblings have been more
successful than I, by the way, I mean, to my mother's credit. And my one sister who, you know,
went to Northwestern, has an MBA, built some of the most sophisticated systems. She spent her
whole career at Accenture and just recently retired as a chief executive of all of consulting.
But at one point she took off time to be, to spend with her family and then went back,
go back to work. She's talking to me and she's like, I don't know if I should go back to work,
you know, maybe life's past, you know, technology goes so fast. It's been a few years. I'm sitting
there like, what are you talking about? I'm like, you know, look at her credentials, they're far
outstanding. I'm like, and I thought to myself like, ding, one of those moments, if my own sister
feels that way with all her credentials, I'll bet I went back to work the next day and I said, hey,
pull for me. All the people who've left for parental reasons and, or whatever, family reasons
didn't come back. And it began a program of returnships. And I can't tell you how many,
in men and women, it was because they didn't feel confident to come back. They thought
technology passed them by. Okay. We said, it's three months, you can stay one month,
three months, doesn't matter. It was a lot of people, like one day, they're like, you're right,
not that much happened. Well, it happened, but I caught up. I actually know more than I think,
you know? And, and I, so it was a long answer to your question about, I didn't, but I am so
empathetic and I am in awe of what they are able to do. So, and it made me then I think more
empathetic to the policies and the like around that topic. So you could keep great people in the
workforce. So you mentioned you're friends with Meher Bara, the CEO of GM. I didn't mean to
name drop. So don't I love her. She's amazing. So I just wanted to, I'm just curious. She should do
your podcast. We'll, we'll make it happen. But a great leader. I was, I tell Mary what I think
of her is I think she's one of the most authentic leaders out there. Most authentic. I mean,
he's just very different companies, huge challenges. I worked there first. I remember,
right? So I'm very, you know, in some ways I'm very beholden, right? You know, I'm very
appreciative of what they did. I mean, Mary and I are circa the same. Well, I'm a bit older, so,
but circa the genre. Do you exchange wisdoms? Oh yeah. Yeah. When you do anything hard,
it takes time and perseverance like we talked about. And you can get that.
Where do you get the fuel for it? You can either get it from your attitude or you can get it from
your network or your relationships. And I'm a firm believer relationships are from what you give,
not what you get. Meaning you give, trust me, they will come back at the time they need to come back
to you at these moments in life. If you focus on, how can I bring Lex value? There'll be a day I
need Lex and he will be back. And so to those women, to me, relationships are not transactional.
And it's a proof that to this day, even though I'm no longer still active as a CEO, these are
all still my friends. And they're, we are friends, all of us. And I can remember some of them when I
first became a CEO calling me and saying, hey, it's a little lonely here. So let me talk to you.
And then when they became, I did the same for them. And then they remember and they do for
the next generation. And so it's very supportive, almost to a T. Any of the women you could name who
have been CEOs, I would say almost to a T have all been very supportive. In fact, a number of us work
on a little, another non-for-profit right now called Journey, which some women who had started
the Fortune's Most Powerful Women, it started, which was, could we get more women, particularly
diverse women, but women in general, to more quickly be into positions of leadership and power.
And so many of the women you named and more, you know, we all dedicate time mentoring and kind of
creating this little group of fellows every year to do this. Friendship and love is core to this
whole thing, not just the success, but just the whole human condition. Let me ask one last question.
Advice for young people. You've had a difficult upbringing, a difficult life, and you've become
one of the most successful human beings in history. What advice would you give to young people or just
people in general who are struggling a bit, trying to figure out how they can have a career they can
be proud of or maybe a life they can be proud of? I feel like a life you can be proud of is just one
if you leave something a little bit better. It doesn't have to be big, you know. That's a life
well lived, right? It was Churchill who said, you might remember it better than I, you make a
living by what you get and you live a life by what you give, something to that effect. But my advice
would probably, when I'm asked this, I would tell them to ask more questions than give answers.
Just focus on being a sponge. And it's funny, I asked my husband the same question the other
day. I said, hey, we were talking to somebody and people were asking this and he sort of paused for
a while and he said, I tell them patience. I said, what do you mean? And he said,
I see so many young people like they're in such a hurry to somewhere I don't know where
and that if they just had patience and let life unfold, I think they may be surprised where they
ended up. And actually, I think that's a really good answer to be honest. Along the way, keep
asking questions, keep that childlike curiosity. I know it sounds so easy to say. It's just so,
you know. Yeah, like you said, the obvious things. Yeah. I think they tend to be the most profound.
Jeannie, you're an incredible human being. You're an inspiration to so many. Thank you for helping
run and contribute to one of the great companies that bring so much good power to the world. And
thank you for putting in the hard work of putting it all in the great book. And thank you for
talking today. This is a huge honor. Thank you for doing it. You did a lovely job. Thanks for
listening to this conversation with Jeannie Rometty. To support this podcast, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Eleanor
Roosevelt. Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized either way.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.