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This content is an interview with Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, discussing her career, leadership philosophy, and life lessons, emphasizing authenticity, resilience, and the importance of "good power" to drive positive change.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm Kathy Hawkes, Associate Dean for External Relations
and Global Programs here at MIT Sloan.
We are excited to be partnering with our friends at the School
of Engineering on this event today,
and thank you for joining our iLead spring series.
The iLead series is so close to the school's mission,
bringing principled, innovative leaders to MIT
to spend time with us.
So thank you so much for being here.
Three things to know before I turn things over to Anantha.
We will have live Q&A at the end of the fireside chat,
so be filing those questions away.
We'll be passing microphones around.
Welcome to our friends on Zoom.
For all of you, you may enter the questions into the Q&A box
as we go along, and someone in the auditorium
will announce it for you.
And finally, this session is being recorded
and will be shared in the coming weeks.
So with that, it is my pleasure to turn things over
to the Dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the Vannevar Bush
Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science Ananta Chandrakasan.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kathy.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us here today.
I'm thrilled to co-host this event with Dean Schmittlein
and to be able to gather our Sloan and School of Engineering
students in person, as well as to welcome our alumni
participants virtually.
I'm always excited when we can bring our schools together.
I'm really delighted and deeply honored
to introduce our guest speaker, Ginni Rometty, former chairman,
president, and CEO of IBM.
Ginni is a renowned business leader and innovator.
She first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981
before eventually becoming its ninth chairman, president,
and chief executive officer in 2012.
Under her leadership, the 100-year-old company
reinvented 50% of its portfolio, built a $25 billion
hybrid cloud business, and established leadership
in AI and quantum computing.
In 2017, during her tenure as chairman, president, and CEO,
MIT and IBM collaborated to create the MIT IBM Watson AI
Lab, which continues to drive innovations
in AI algorithms and systems.
She also drove record results in diversity and inclusion
and supported the explosive growth
of an innovative high school program
to prepare the workforce of the future in over 28 countries.
Through her work with the Business Roundtable,
she helped redefine the purpose of the corporation.
She was named Fortune's number one most powerful woman
for three years in a row, is a member of the National Academy
of Engineering, and has been honored
with the designation of officier in the French Legion d'Honneur.
Today she serves on multiple boards and co-chairs
OneTen, a coalition committed to upskilling, hiring,
and promoting one million Black Americans without four year
degrees by 2030 into family sustaining jobs and careers.
Ginni has a longstanding relationship with MIT.
She served as a member of the MIT presidential CEO
advisory board as well as the advisory board of the MIT Task
Force on the Work of the Future.
Last year, Ginni served as the fifth MIT visiting innovation
fellow.
As a fellow, she focused on advancing
women in STEM and entrepreneurship
as well as bolstering ethics and responsibility
in a digital age.
She's also the author of the recently released Good Power,
Leading Positive Change in our Lives, Work, and the World,
a moving combination of memoir, leadership lessons,
and big ideas.
The book shares milestones from her life and career
while redefining power as a way to drive meaningful change
in positive ways for ourselves, our organizations,
and for the many, not just the a few-- a concept
she calls good power.
With that, I'd like to give a warm welcome to Ginni
and hand the session off to Dean Schmittlein, who
will lead us in conversation.
So welcome.
[APPLAUSE]
Ananta, that was very long [LAUGHTER]
and very comprehensive.
And yet incomplete.
Oh, no, no.
So let's try to fill in some more of the blanks.
OK, good.
Nice to see you, David.
Nice to see you.
Thank you.
Welcome back to MIT always.
So I think it would be great if we can focus in three areas.
One is career and some of your early experiences,
the time at IBM we need to talk about,
and I'll have a couple of questions for you;
and then your experience as a leader;
and life lessons and advice.
We'll turn to that, of course.
So if we could start maybe closer
to the beginning, your early years or early career.
Are there some aspirations that you had for yourself or ways
that you thought about yourself in an organization that,
in your mind, had something to do with a trajectory that's
extraordinary that you've experienced and pursued?
Well, can I ask them a question before I answer one?
You're the boss.
So just to give me a feel, how many folks are here
from the engineering school?
OK, and then Sloan?
OK, OK.
I just wanted to know who my audience is.
The poor little engineers will meet later.
[LAUGHTER]
So that helps me a little bit.
So we're going to talk about a lot of things today,
and hopefully it's going to be--
maybe you'll take away a few things
that will be helpful for each one of you.
It's the only reason to do this.
So early on, what were my insights and aspirations?
I had none.
And so I know that sounds probably pretty odd,
but in many of you, how many, if I asked you, how many of you
want to build something and run something?
Almost everybody in the room, right?
So it probably stems back to my upbringing, which is really
part of where I start the book.
Because I say I was raised by strong women but who
all suffered huge tragedies.
And this probably gets to what my only aspiration
was at the time.
My great grandma had been the last person alive
at World War I to leave Belarus to come here.
She never did speak English.
She cleaned bathrooms in the Wrigley building
in Chicago her whole life.
My grandma would be a widow twice by her very early age,
and would sew lampshades.
And then my mother, when she was only 32,
my father would abandon our family
and leave my mother and four of us
with no food, no home, nothing.
And so what did I learn out of that,
we'll get to what the answer is to that aspiration question,
was all I saw at that point in my life was first,
be fiercely independent.
Because what I saw with my mom when my father left and said
he didn't care what happened to us,
my mom had never had a day of education outside
of high school.
She had never had a job, but she was so determined
to not let that define who our family would be.
She went back and got a little bit of education, and then
a little better job, and a little bit--
enough to get us off of financial aid.
And that taught me, don't let anyone else define you.
Only you define who you are.
And this will come back into my life
many times that if you don't define who you are,
someone else will.
And that taught me, as well, though, hey, hard work
pays off.
I know maybe some people don't believe that anymore,
but just hard work.
And the third thing was to be fiercely independent,
meaning never have to count on anyone else.
So my only aspiration then to start my career--
so different than I suspect so many of you
now-- was just to work really hard, do well.
Something else will happen.
You'll be able to take care of yourself
and not have to rely on someone else.
So that's where it starts is, honestly, nothing
more interesting than that.
I would say that's pretty interesting.
Not really.
I mean--
What about education?
Yeah, so, well, I'm talking to a group
here that highly believes in this topic.
So two things I would mention on education that
got formed early in my mind.
Only when you write a book on your life will
you ever reflect back and realize these things.
I'll come back to why did I ever write a book,
but one was from my mom's experience,
it taught me that access and aptitude
were two different things.
In that this idea that--
my mom wasn't, I would say dumb.
That sounds horrible.
I don't mean it that way.
My mom was actually smart.
She just didn't have access to anything.
And so I started to realize, and this
would come back into my career many times,
that brains are distributed evenly.
Opportunity is not.
And so that would impact my view of education strongly.
Now, the other thing that would impact it, I was good at math.
And so I just--
I loved it.
I didn't ever want to memorize anything.
My brother could sleep on a book and know what it said,
and I used to--
it's so frustrating.
He had a test the next day, and about maybe midnight
he'd open the book or something.
And I'd have been studying for eight hours.
And so what I always attributed math and science to-- now,
I know you're not all math and science--
but that it was a genre that you could study and understand
how to come to an answer and how to solve a problem.
You didn't have to memorize it.
And that's what I loved about the math, and that ability.
So that impacted-- and to this day,
I try to convince more and more people to go into not just
business, don't give me your--
math and sciences because to my view,
it teaches you to solve any kind of problem.
Because all problems are big nowadays,
and they've got to be broken up into little pieces.
So I strongly-- so from the very beginning,
I went into engineering.
And I was the only woman in engineering at that time,
but that is why I went into engineering.
And I don't want to get us off on a tangent.
Feel free.
It might be more interesting.
I don't think so.
But the OneTen initiative, which I so love,
and which you co-founded.
Well, yeah.
It's worth a quick tangent, guys, because so many of you
are going to run companies and run groups.
And David said to me, Ginni, what
would be the one thing you want to get across to folks?
And it's like a silver line through the book,
and it is this point about access,
and aptitude, and lifelong learning.
Because everything in our world is set up for once
and done education.
And I mean, the government systems, the programs,
the reinforcement, the time you go to school then,
yet I found I would much rather hire people for a propensity
to learn than what they knew.
And so OneTen, which going to take me
like real fast through a life, I have this experience
with my mom about access and aptitude.
I watched this.
Then I'm going to really fast forward.
I would become CEO in a time when,
I know you'll find this weird, there was nothing like cyber,
and we were beginning a cyber business
and had to find people to hire.
Unemployment's 10%, and I can't find anybody with skills.
And serendipity, it was truly serendipity.
I would walk into a meeting the next day--
or next hour, it was-- on corporate social
responsibility, which I don't believe this
is but I'll come back to that.
And they're saying, hey, we're going
to work with a high school in a very poor neighborhood
with a community college, and we're
going to give them a curriculum, help them with internships,
maybe give them a few jobs.
We think we could teach cyber.
And I said, OK.
Well, lo and behold, I'm going to fast forward
without giving you the whole story because I
would spend 15 years on this.
This is a talent strategy.
And what I would learn was that all these first generation
people had never been to school.
Very smart, by the way, just had no opportunity and access.
And this would be true in every developed country in the world.
If I could hire people for their skills, not just a degree,
get to what I do right now with OneTen,
I would learn half the jobs in this country
are over-credentialed.
They require a college degree when they should not to start.
I didn't say you don't eventually
maybe need to need one.
And in these people that we would hire, we would--
of course, I have a bunch of engineers,
and we only hired PhDs and university grads.
We would redo, it would take five years,
all of our credentialing to it would end up
to be 50% required a college degree to start, not 95%.
We would go on to work with these kind of schools
and set them up in 30 countries around the world.
There's a pipeline of 150,000 kids coming through.
New York and Texas are the biggest states.
They're up to 150 schools like this now.
But it was a bigger concept I started
to learn-- skills first.
Hire people for skills, not just a degree,
and I'll fast forward to OneTen and there.
On the heels of George-- you just said,
so what does all this have to do?
So to me, it was a jackpot.
A brand new pool of talent, extremely capable.
I measured their results for years.
They performed as well as my college grads.
They took more education.
They almost all went back, by the way, and finished college.
It just was a matter of where they
start should not have determined where they ended.
They had an earlier on-ramp than you and I would have had.
And on the heels, then, of George Floyd's murder,
business was looking at what to do to help.
And I had just participated in the work of the future,
and there are numbers that will always be in my head.
65% of Americans don't have a college degree.
80% of Black Americans do not have a college degree.
So if you wonder what matters to democracy--
--brothers, sisters, and I each have a different memory.
Oh, that's my book.
That's Priti.
She's mine.
So she's somehow maybe listening to my book.
I hope it's not the first time because she's
worked with me for a year.
But on the heels of this George Floyd
murder, what would happen was business is like, oh,
do we give money?
What do we do?
And we're like, no, we should do what we do best,
hire people and get them skill.
And economic opportunity's the best answer to systemic racism.
That's a long answer that I didn't
mean to be so long, which takes me to OneTen.
We ended up forming a group called OneTen,
1 million Black employees in 10 years, as an author said,
that said, they had the aspiration--
Ken Chenault, Ken Frazier.
I don't know if any of you know them.
One ran American Express.
One ran Merck.
Two of my very good friends.
So they had this great vision-- too great, and I'm like, OK,
but they don't know how to do it.
I know how to do it.
So I'm like, they're the visionary.
I'm the plumber, and it's like, skills first
is the answer because of this dilemma, 80%.
But if we could get people with the right skills
to get started, they can get into these jobs.
And so we're 100,000 people in now that we've gotten jobs.
Obviously have 900,000 to go, so hopefully hitting
a knee of our curve.
But it would be this idea of skills
first as a movement in this country and around the world
that I say is as important of an aspect
if we believe democracy should succeed in this country
and around the world.
Because if people don't think they have a better future,
they pick another system.
They riot.
They do all sorts of things.
And all that has to do with economic opportunity which
I go back-- it's so funny how a line goes through your life.
I go back to my mother.
And so that's--
I really don't need you up here.
I could talk the whole time, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a bad habit.
So I feel horrible because he's the Dean of a great school,
right?
So go ahead, what is your next question?
Because I could lead into another one,
but go right ahead.
The best sessions are ones that have little me and a lot--
No, no, no.
Do you agree with anything I said?
Yes, I want to say yes--
I am vice chair at a university, so it's not
like I'm against university at all.
So it's-- yeah.
So only because we're in a quiet room
where no one will repeat what we said--
But we're on a--
I love both Kens and Ginni, and what she said about the three
is correct.
Oh, that I'm the plumber and they're the visionaries?
That's right.
But in terms of the plumbing, what you did, I would suggest,
is create a program and a process,
but you also, the three of you, helped change the narrative.
And that's not only going to happen within the four
corners of OneTen.
It's really so important, too.
Thank you.
Oh, no, no.
I hope this is a movement in the country.
So OneTen, I should say, well the other part
that Dave is referring to.
So we got 100 of the biggest companies
to join us and not only donate money to build the system,
but go through all their job requisitions now,
and it just starts there.
That's the first thing.
Because if the only thing you do is take the little check
off a box, trust me, you'll still
hire college degree people.
You got to train your recruiters.
You got to change your whole talent
system to be a build-oriented system, not
buy-oriented system.
You've got to pay people for their skills,
not their degrees only.
It ends up to be a whole cultural change,
and that's why all these companies are working on it.
Some of you very well may work for many of the companies we're
talking about.
And I hope if that's all I do in life that that
will be a life well-lived.
And it won't be.
Well, I hope we got to get our work done.
OK.
So we only have a minute left.
Yeah, I know.
Sorry about that.
So let's talk about that whole IBM thing, $25 billion
and reinventing 50% of the company, and cloud, and so on.
So just take 30 seconds and take us through how you did that.
I agree.
For everybody in here who's starting something or going
to be or in the middle of a company that was, look,
there is no doubt IBM is the oldest technology company.
So you're sitting there thinking, well, wait a second.
There's Google.
There's Amazon.
There's this.
There's that.
You're right, and one day everyone else
will have their chance to have to reinvent multiple times.
Because in retrospect, it's easy to have act one and act two.
Act three, four, and five get really hard.
And I would take over at a time of IBM
where you don't get to pick your times.
And it would be at a moment where
it would be the most tumultuous time of reinvention in tech,
and I would say we were not prepared for that.
We had been very prepared for the past, not the future.
And it was multiple technology trends.
Go back to 2012.
You have cloud starting, big data, AI.
You've got mobile, social--
I mean, cell phones aren't all that long ago,
and all that's swirling.
And we're an enterprise company, not a consumer company.
This will become a very important difference.
And so so be it.
We each get our moments.
And so what I write in the book, there's
a whole middle section called the power--
there's power of me about what could I practically help people
with the tough lessons I learned as an individual?
At some point, though, you manage people maybe.
And the middle is the power of we
when you care less about yourself
and more about other people.
And it is revisionist history.
I am the first one to tell you this in the book.
So meaning in retrospect.
So you say, how did I do it?
It's only in retrospect, you know,
what did I learn in the mistakes that I made in that time frame?
And there's a couple of principles that I talk about.
But the one I'll mention here, to David's question,
was my biggest learning was to understand what to change,
but what should endure.
And I don't know about you, often when
things have to change, people run to change everything,
like I did, too.
But I made some mistakes in that I also
had to go back and refocus on what should endure.
Because that is often the more difficult
question to answer even if it has to be modernized.
So it doesn't mean what do you hold on to that's old?
It's what is your soul, and what is it that you can build from?
Because if people are going to have to change a lot,
there needs to be something they can hold on to while
those winds of change whip.
And so change, like we've been very involved with MIT
on the semiconductor side.
IBM was the father of semiconductors,
the first one to commercialize it in the country.
So here we are, though, now decades later.
As an example on change, I write a big section
on how to manage tension and run to conflict.
Because I'm sorry, in the world we live in now,
there are no good answers to anything.
And it's either x--
people say x or y, polarized everything.
And I really want to try to convince you that sometimes you
have to sit there to figure out a third way through something.
And that idea for semiconductors for us
was what we had to do to find this third because I
had shareholders who were like, get out of that business.
It costs so much money.
It's $10 billion of fab.
I mean, look at the country's situation now.
I had customers like, oh my God, that part of your business--
which isn't big, but I rely on it
to run every bank, airline in this country,
you can't get out of it.
So I couldn't please anybody.
And the net of it is how that story ends
on how to manage tension and find a third way through,
what I eventually learned, we would divest the manufacturing.
We would keep all of the R&D, which was really the crown
jewel for the country, and eventually find great partners
to do the manufacturing.
That sounds so easy.
It's not easy I mean, you're like,
conceptually that's so simple.
But the problem is those processes
had all been built together.
So in other words, those of you that do any manufacturing,
in manufacturing, they're fixing stuff
that they didn't like in design.
Well, when you have partners, you can't do it that way.
So it was convincing a whole group of people.
So anyways, that's the change message-- what
did you say, what did I learn?
I learned a lot about how to manage tension and find
a third way through.
That's my lesson.
On the endure part, I would just have to tell you--
and I think you're seeing this with a lot of young companies
now--
20 years, 30-- it gets to know what makes you you.
And there was a time, because all this new stuff
was happening, people were like, well, buy this company.
Get that.
Go into this area, this area.
And I can remember a phone call I had with Arne Sorenson, ran
Marriott--
Arne's passed now.
He was a great, great leader.
And I was calling, it might have even been against Facebook.
I don't remember who we were bidding against-- a marketing
program.
And if you can't tell, I'm a little bit competitive.
And I was calling him.
I'm like, hey, let me tell you all the reasons you should
do-- your big partners do this.
And he said to me, Ginni, why do you even care about this?
He's like, I rely on you for all this mission-critical work.
You should just be the best IBM you could be.
And I will always remember those words,
be the best IBM you can be.
And it would lead me to not just a one conversation,
but I'm like, you're right.
These are ornaments.
All this other stuff is ornaments on a tree.
That is the core of what I do.
I do mission-critical work.
I would divest to these businesses,
and it would lead to $10 billion of divestitures, not just
the one call.
But I mean, that kind of concept.
And so that idea of what should endure but modernize,
so I knew what I was then, and that
would lead to hybrid cloud.
That's the principle, and I'll give you two others
and stop very fast.
The other thing I learned the most, though, is it
wasn't just what you do.
Both of those comments were lessons on what to do.
How work gets done is as important as what the work is.
So that would be super--
that would take me down design thinking
at scale of hundred thousands of people--
agile at hundreds of thousands.
Today that's common.
It wasn't in 2012.
And then skills.
2 out of 10 people had skills for the future.
We would end when I retired at 8 out of 10.
So back to all that skill thing, which
would take me down that path about this
is all about getting people to want to continue
to change their skills.
Don't hire for a skill.
I always got in trouble when I hired people for an expert
skill because usually that's all they wanted to do,
and the industry changed too fast.
So that kind of gets-- like I end
the book on a thought, which is you'll do great things,
but maybe what you do will matter a lot,
but I do believe how you do it will matter just as much.
And the how is worth thinking about.
So thank you for giving us in this setting
a little bit of a sense of the how
that you approached this, as well.
Ginni, one of the things that talked about about
this session, not every CEO who is a woman
likes to touch on that dimension of being a leader.
We agreed that you might be willing to say a few words.
Just so nice.
Well I have to say, it's a tap-- how many of my women
in the room, how many of you like to talk about--
first, raise your hand if you're a woman.
OK, that's a bad question in this day and age.
Anyone who identifies as a woman, and then that
likes to talk about it.
There's only-- well, at least, thank you,
there's a few of you.
And even just as a young person, I
was often the only woman in my classes.
This is a '70s, and then into the '80s.
And I knew when I spoke if I said something stupid,
everybody remembered.
Because I was just-- by virtue of being the only woman there.
And so it was good and bad.
It wasn't really fair.
On the other hand, it made me study a lot.
That is what did it because I was like, OK,
I got to be prepared so I don't say something stupid.
And this horrible habit has stayed with me forever,
by the way.
And so therefore, though, I never wanted to talk about it.
I would always say, hey, just look
at me for my stuff, my work.
Please don't want to talk about it.
And two things would happen.
I told David I would talk about it.
One would be a third into my career
or so, I was giving a speech on financial services.
That was my industry expertise.
And I thought it was a very riveting speech, you guys.
And I was in Australia, and a man at the end comes up to me
and he says--
I think he's going to ask me something about my speech,
so great it was.
And he says, I wish my daughter had been here.
And it's one of those watershed moments
you always remember, and I kind of back to the power of we,
not me.
I was like, OK, this isn't really about me.
This is about other people.
And when you get to a certain level of responsibility,
it is not about you.
And that my pushing away this topic always,
people cannot be what they cannot see.
That saying you've heard.
And therefore, I needed to be a bit--
I needed to embrace this being a role model
because it wasn't really for me.
It was for everybody else.
So that would be a turning point.
And then the other turning point would
be my husband, who I had been married 43 years.
Is it like my most popular LinkedIn post?
This is crazy to me.
Like I get-- well, maybe not most, but close.
I post something-- these guys talk me
into posting on my wedding anniversary.
I've been married 43 years.
And it's a picture of my wedding and my husband today.
I look the same.
He does not.
And so-- OK, maybe this is why I'm about what I can tell you I
find so funny.
And then I come back to what I learned.
So it's got like half a million impressions.
I'm like, who cares about this?
But apparently, there's a half a million on--
because I talk about my husband in this.
So 43 years, but back in early years, I'd been offered a job--
a pretty big job.
Man, I was working for, like let's say
I was working for David.
And David said, Ginni, I'm getting--
he's getting promoted, and I want you to take my job.
And my answer was, David, I said,
I'm not ready for your job.
I said two more years and I would the rest of the business.
Give me two more years.
And he said, I think you should go to the interview.
So I go to the interview.
Person offers me the job, and what
do you think my answer was?
Anyone?
David, what do you think my answer was?
I'm hoping it's yes.
No.
I said, I want to go home and talk to my husband.
And he said to me, OK.
I go home.
I don't remember whether it was home or phone
because I traveled always.
And I said-- I told my husband this story, and he says,
Ginni, do you think a man would answer it that way?
I said, no.
He said, I know you.
You'll be comfortable in six months
and ready to do something else.
This is ridiculous.
Why do you always doubt?
You're always talking about what you don't know.
And I don't know that this is true just for--
I have found it to be very true for women and many men, too.
And it would lead me to this--
it's probably what the title of the book should have been.
Growth and comfort never coexist--
never.
And to really internalize that.
And if you do, it would have a remarkable influence on me.
But as a woman leader, and I would
speak about this with my IBM people around the world,
all 170 countries we'd have this,
and I found it true everywhere I went.
But if you understood that and really--
it would get me--
I was willing to then take more risk, then more risk, then more
risk, and then I even got to the point where I was like,
I was looking for trouble.
Because I was like, hey, if I'm not comfortable,
I am learning something.
So I was just helping someone else who's
in a really thick problem, and the person
was really lamenting.
And I said, hey, I want you to think about a year from now.
I'm telling you how much you're going to know.
You are going to feel so much better
at the other end of this.
And so that, as being a woman leader,
that was part of my biggest advice I would give
or to anyone.
I would find it true for a company, for a country,
doesn't matter.
Growth and comfort never coexist.
Thank you for that answer.
Thank you for being--
It was an honest answer.
That was that.
--willing to take the question.
It also helps us do a little bit of double duty
because I want to ask you about the book, and--
Well, I've only been talking about it the whole time,
but go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so and we're going to need, I
think, to open up the questions from the known and unknown
universe before too long.
But are there-- when you think about the book,
it is a really great book.
And I advise you not only to have--
You don't have to buy it.
They're going to give you one.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
But give it a read.
Are there other lessons that you'd
want to call out before we open it up a little bit further?
No.
Look, I-- why did I even write a book?
It was never anything I wanted, never on my hit parade
to do ever.
I would joke, oh, it'd be a pamphlet.
I would make jokes about it.
And after I retired, people say, hey,
but you've had such an interesting journey.
It gets back to this role model.
This journey has been so interesting,
and you've had so many lessons.
And then I had to think about, and this
is the part that made the book super hard for me to write.
I really wanted to write about that education topic, skills
first--
like a whole book on that.
And people were like, nah.
They're like, what people really want
to know is, what did you learn?
People learn from your mistakes, your feelings.
That's really hard to put your life
and be authentic in a book.
I mean, I was used to being graded every day as a CEO.
And I speak about that because I had huge critics of what I had.
But I knew what I had to do.
I knew I had to give the company a foundation for its next era,
and that was going to be brutal.
And I did.
And they've grown, and they've done well, and my success--
I mean, this is all I could hope for.
But I knew so much of what I did would benefit the future, not
the present.
So I talk about that.
And so my only point of-- so when I ended up
to write a book, I hope it is in service of you
because there is no other reason to do this.
In that what I'd like you to know is
I hope it's full practical tools to deal with all these issues
of a non-perfect world.
But to inspire you that you could do really tough things
because the punch line is how to do really hard things,
but do them in a positive way--
a positive way that embraces tension, runs to conflict,
doesn't polarize things, does not use fear.
I believe there's a good way to lead,
and I think there's plenty of bad examples out there today.
So that's in the end of the day.
What you would take away is I hope
there's practical tools for how you do
hard stuff in a positive way.
And incredibly well-prepared to do it, which
is also part of your history.
That was just my life.
That just happened to be-- yeah.
Can I-- thank you.
So are we going to open it up soon?
OK.
But can I just take 12 seconds to say one thing.
Say anything you'd like.
The first time you appeared in a course
that Susan Hockfield and I lead at the Sloan School,
I don't think you knew quite what to expect.
You knew that there'd be plenty of questions
like I trust there will be, and it was on Zoom, as I recall.
And you appeared on Zoom and you said, I hope I'm ready.
And you had a stack of paper--
I'm not making it up-- the stack of papers was this high
and you said, I've been doing my homework,
and I'm ready for this class.
This is sickness, yeah.
I don't know.
I can tell you that no other CEO has
come to that course with that.
That's embarrassing.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Always doing homework, right?
You're doing your homework.
Exactly.
So how shall we manage questions?
Oh, and there we have them.
Anything.
Technology.
By the way, we didn't talk a lot.
You can name it.
Hi, Ginni.
Thank you for this, and thank you, Dean.
I was just listening--
I haven't read your book, I must admit,
but I have listened to your interviews previously
and I knew that I needed to just be here for today.
I wanted to ask you about your childhood a little bit more,
and specifically, the beliefs that were
imbibed in your younger years.
And I wanted to learn a bit more about how it applied
to this context of IBM, and specifically, you
said benefit the future, not the present.
And it was brutal.
And there would be people who would be after you--
there'd be a target on your back.
I'd love to learn a little bit more about that, if I may.
thank you.
The biggest thing-- and so do some of who Brene Brown is?
Kind of a--
I had a brief conversation with her about can
you lead and do hard stuff if you haven't
lived through tragedy yourself?
And we were kind of even talking about it particularly
in light of young people today-- really young, younger than you
guys.
Meaning in that if they've been sheltered,
and coddled, and not really had a tough situation, can they?
And I guess her conclusion to me in that conversation
was, we don't have to have tragedy,
but you've had to have gone through some adversity.
And the only reason I give you what I learned about
and what it helped me do for IBM was
what I saw with what happened with my family, that
defined the bar for bad for me.
And nothing else looked bad compared to that.
All this other stuff, as bad as it could be,
was never as bad as that.
And so that gives you a bit of a freedom to--
this feeling of there's no bad ending.
You do everything you know how to do,
and you could do really hard things because that's bad.
What you're in now is not bad.
And so that's one thing I think my childhood taught me.
I think the other was this issue-- you guys are here.
You're big learners.
I am just a big learner about knowledge.
At first, it was a shield to me.
It would later be the confidence.
It would then later allow me to do more and more.
So I'm still a really big believer
in a propensity to learn--
this constant desire.
It taught me that.
But it also taught me, I'll leave you with the third thing,
it was--
oh, one more appendage to the learning part.
I know, I got to get my answer shorter, was--
the book is short, by the way--
is this idea of always apprenticing.
Like I ended up doing 50 different--
I mean, I was always learning something else
in that in our lives, I think this
is so overlooked, the value of apprenticing on things.
But the third big thing I would say that my childhood taught
me was it's this value of community in the small things
that you do.
And I should have never been at Northwestern.
And I could have never afforded it.
I mean, what my neighbors did, we had this house.
We couldn't afford grass, anything.
It looked horrible.
The next door people had nice houses.
And instead of being mean to us, the guy
would say, well here, use my lawn mower to mow your weeds.
I mean, he would hire my sister to babysit when
they didn't need a babysitter.
They would-- it was all these little things people did that
helped--
fed my other sister breakfast when we couldn't afford it.
It was a million things that I don't think you realize matter,
very personal.
And that would influence my leadership style tremendously
about appealing to people's hearts
and minds at the same time, and that it takes a community
to do things.
And General Motors paid for two years in Northwestern for me,
and Northwestern is an extremely expensive school like you guys.
[LAUGHTER]
That's true.
And I learned a bit about loyalty.
Like in those days, they gave me a scholarship
with no strings attached and paid all my tuition,
all my everything.
And I felt a great loyalty to them.
And so I went to work there, but I learned at an early age,
then, the difference between a job and a career.
You have to have passion about what you do,
some part of that day.
And I wasn't passionate.
My good friend is Mary Barra now who loves cars.
So I just didn't love them like she does.
And so that taught me a lot about that.
So those are the kinds of things that I
talk about in those early years that-- and just
showing up in those early years and being and doing what you
say are all those little things that I write about
in the beginning.
I don't know.
Does that help your answer at all, or just--
OK.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I guess this-- oh, it works.
My name is Emily Warren.
I'm a sophomore undergraduate majoring in finance, minoring
computer science and Chinese.
And I recently watched this Ted Talk that's titled,
stop managing and start leading.
And I was just curious to hear your thoughts
on how we should be leading efficiently,
or what you think makes an exceptional CEO.
Thank you.
Well, CEO, that's-- look, what's one word I could leave you with
in today's world?
You can vote on it yourselves.
I think the best leaders are the most authentic leaders today.
So that's the one word I would lead you with was authentic.
And Emily, that's-- and I think that feels better to a lot
of people today than it used to, but in my day it wasn't.
And I think people want to follow leaders.
And so that idea that followership-- you know,
followership doesn't happen by an org chart.
I learned that watching someone who--
I thought, because IBM was a big company, half a million
people, that I thought, God, he gets everybody
to do what he wants.
And like a fraction of these people actually work for him.
People follow passion, authenticity,
a knowledge of what they're doing-- people follow that.
And so I think that idea of authentic and followership
are very much related in today's world of leadership.
It takes courage.
Yeah, but courage comes from conviction, don't you think?
What do you think is the root of courage?
Confidence, often, and what builds confidence.
Yeah, you're right, because confidence can also come
from facts and other things.
And sometimes confidence can come from nothing, too, right?
So [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] I know a lot
of people like that-- not me, but others.
Can I do--
Yeah, please.
There was a CEO in a class that I was leading this past year,
and someone asked about imposter syndrome,
and how you think about that as a leader,
and how you help people who may be experiencing imposter
syndrome.
And the person said, well, I always
try to help someone work-- wait, were you
thinking that I felt imposter syndrome?
I've never felt that once in my life.
So some people just have confidence, don't they?
This is interesting.
Founded or not.
How many people think of imposter syndrome?
Yeah, that's so interesting to me.
For yourself, or someone-- your brother?
Or is it for that kind of thing?
I got asked that question a lot writing the book
to write about imposter syndrome.
There's a lot of things that ended up going in the book
after--
like OK, like you'd expect me, my co-writer,
she's like, I've never had a writer have so many people
pre-read their book and get all their critiques.
And she's like, you handled those so well.
And I'm like, well, I would certainly rather
fix the problems now versus after it's published.
And so we ended up adding a lot of things
that people-- and this imposter syndrome
is one that came up a lot.
And I have to say, but I have--
I, too, I just didn't call it that.
I've already told you I didn't feel confident,
so that's clearly imposter syndrome, right?
But you guys, a lot of your hands went up,
and I found there are tons of people feel that way.
And my way around it was always that extra preparation.
And then you'd find you're more prepared than anyone
else in the room, so like, why do you feel like an imposter?
So that would be my way around it.
It's a controversial topic.
It is, yeah.
It's so interesting.
OK, sorry.
Hi, my name is Joyce.
I'm a second year MBA student.
My question to you is, I'm curious what drives you.
I think a lot of CEOs come in and from personal tragedy,
from personal motivations, they climb up the ranks.
They have this passion.
They're like, I want to be the best.
I want to do all these things.
And what I'm struck by in your conversation
is that you care deeply about people,
about empowering others.
And I'm curious how that adds or is
in conflict with your progression to the CEO
because most people that I find that care deeply about people
don't necessarily want to be the figurehead and CEO.
That's interesting question, I think.
And I'm not sure there's a--
Joyce, that there's a right or wrong on this topic, actually.
Because there's brilliant people that maybe don't care
for people too much, right?
I always felt, back to that authentic point--
and if you wanted to accomplish big things,
you know those old sayings, you can't do them alone
and all that kind of thing.
I guess because I was always grown on scale,
like in big things, it became clear to me
that you couldn't do it yourself very early.
And even my childhood taught me that.
I could do very little by myself.
It was this community, family that got us through.
So that's in my head, and then I'm
in a place that's very large.
And you realize to get big stuff done
in the world you've got to bring people along,
which is, to me, the point of good power.
And the whole piece is about how to drive societal change.
Like don't give up.
I see a lot of people feel, oh, the system is useless,
or you can't change government.
You can't change these things.
And I have a lot of--
that's not true.
It doesn't happen like a big bang,
but it does-- it's like a pebble in the water,
and it just moves out.
And you stay with it.
And there's ways to do it to get lots of people
to do things as long as you don't
force them to do it your way.
And I think that was a big learning,
and that all gets back to why the focus on people.
And that's why, like these principles
in this middle section, I do try to make it a bit educational
and try to--
a timeless lesson that you could apply to any problem.
Start with, be in service of something.
Do not serve it.
Because if you're in service of something,
the big difference is I care David succeeds in his goal.
And as a result, I will make mine asynchronously.
And there's a bit of trust in there because I've got
to assume-- it's like if you go to dinner and the waiter,
I write--
the waiter brings you your food.
Does that mean you had a good night?
Not always.
If he really cares about the evening,
you can tell the difference, right?
And he's doing that because he hopes
he gets a big tip-- or she.
May not, but it's a leap of faith.
I found that true in business.
To be in service of something will bring more people with you
than this idea about building belief for people
is like a tiring, never-ending job.
And my learning on it, we were talking about Ken Chenault
a minute ago.
Again, these are dear friends now, but Ken used to say to me,
the role of a leader is to paint reality and give hope.
Because it's not rah, rah stuff.
Build belief is not, hey, let's go do this.
Let me tell you all the reasons.
And I Google it one day, and it's actually
Napoleon who said it.
So I told Ken he's got to reframe his articles on this.
But it would become such a big part of bringing people along
to be honest when things are bad and about it,
but always a way forward.
That would be what I would also learn from my childhood.
I don't care what anyone says, always a way forward.
And when you're changing things like society,
you got to believe that in that you
can make a big complex problem into little pieces
like you learn in engineering, and you just
keep working on all of them.
And they're all related.
So I don't think it's about whether you believe in people
and want to leave-- it's like, if you want to do big stuff,
you have to believe in it is how I feel on that topic.
I also liked it, so I mean, that would-- it was more me.
But I don't know how you do big, important stuff
without bringing a lot of people with you these days.
Can I do--
You've been listening to someone who's brought a lot of people
with her.
I think, are we supposed to bring
this to closure, or one more?
I have one last question before we go.
We have permission for one more.
OK.
Is this your question?
It's from Zoom.
Oh, OK.
So one of our friends--
Is my husband on or something?
[LAUGHTER]
How can leaders--
He's on a golf course.
How can leaders develop resilience in today's world,
and how do you instill that as a value with your team?
OK, I didn't realize the time.
So here's two things on resilience.
I beg you to-- because I think this is--
we didn't get to talk about good tech,
all right because I feel strongly you're
all stewards of technology, by the way.
And that means you manage the upside and the downside of tech
in parallel, which is not what I think is happening right now.
OK, another lecture.
But the resilience, two tips.
I put a whole section in there on resilience for a reason.
You mentioned, I had some of the roughest of times, right?
And I write about it.
I'm not very clear about it.
And what got me through that was relationships and my attitude.
And my own attitude tips to you would be,
I compartmentalize bad things.
I don't deny them.
I deal with them, plan, box, goes on the shelf.
Go on to the next issue.
Circle back, open up the box, see
if it made progress, back out.
But you can't let it bleed into everything you do.
And so I talk about things like embracing critics,
but don't let them define you.
I will always listen to a critic.
I will.
It's horrible.
But occasionally, there's an ounce of truth in there.
So part of it's your own attitude and conviction.
You talked about conviction, right?
Like my little nephew would say to me--
he was 10, he'd say, "auntie, doesn't that
upset you when they say mean things about IBM
on television?"
And I told him, no.
And I told my mom, turn the TV off.
I said, I'll tell when you can turn it back on.
I said, I'm doing what I know have to do,
and that's conviction.
Relationship.
My tip two on relationship would be relationships
come from what you give, not what you get.
And if you truly live a life that way,
they will always come back in the moments you need them.
And they will be your greatest source of perspective.
So when you are doing really hard things,
I can't tell you how many times people would--
no, no, no, you're looking at that the wrong way.
You're-- no, no, no, no, no.
You should-- no, don't care about that.
That is not important.
It would always be those relationships.
And the one with yourself would be the most important.
And I'll end on that because I write a lot about that.
People would ask me a lot about work-life balance,
and you already talked about my proclivities to all this stuff.
And there would be a time I would get really unhealthy.
I weighed 75, 80 pounds more than I weigh now.
And I was just consumed by my work.
And people say, well, whose fault is that?
And I really realized the only person
that could create boundaries and give balance was me.
That was it.
That IBM, my bosses, they would take everything I could give.
And I really can't anger for that.
It's like inanimate.
That's what institutions do.
And so that was my job to say, boundary.
And I started to set some boundaries,
like I would ride a bicycle on a Saturday morning.
I would read emails--
this is the old days while I was there.
That was my ability to start, and then it would get better.
But I learned that if I set those boundaries
and was clear with people, like I didn't make it up and lie,
people would start to move around those boundaries
and respect them.
And it would give them permission
to do the same thing.
So that resilience is for you to set some boundaries
because if you don't have other things, people, relationships,
friends--
it wasn't quality of time I could spend with them,
it was the quantity.
Not the quantity, it was the quality--
sorry, quality of what I could do.
I would learn to turn the phone upside down.
I would learn to listen, be present in the moment.
I learned that from my husband.
He'd be like, well, you've been in the bathroom 15 minutes.
What could you possibly have been doing
in there other than your phone?
Yep, that's probably true.
I would learn that wasn't it.
I had to be present.
But if I could be present in those moments, in that quality,
it would be such a source of resilience for me.
So that's what I would hope for you, too.
Thank you for these gifts to MIT, to all of these people.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Pleasure.
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