Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity | Lex Fridman Podcast #362
Lex Fridman (00:00):
The following is a conversation with Ginni Rometty, who was a longtime 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. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It’s the best way to support this podcast. We got Athletic Greens for health, ExpressVPN for privacy and security, and InsideTracker for biological monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we’re always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.
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This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and the AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I’ve drank it twice today already. It’s delicious, and it’s a refreshing start for usually the second work session of the day. I start the day with a cup of coffee and just deep, deep, deep focus on the hardest task of the day. And then I break the fast with Athletic Greens, either with a workout before or if I’m not working out that day, just with a kind of mental break.
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But I do it less mantra-like and more just calming my mind and thinking about all the things I’m grateful for, really focusing on the gratitude part. Anyway, so that’s associated with Athletic Greens, and also later on in the day, usually I’ll take another Athletic Greens and I’ll do the same when I’m traveling. I got the travel packs and I got, I guess the non-travel pack version at home. They’ll give you one month’s supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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It’s important to have that data, and it’s important to make the right decisions based on that data, but not over obsess about the data. And that’s a really nice balance. Now, if you’re just completely blind and just kind of hope everything’s gonna turn out okay until you end up in a hospital, that’s not the way to go. So the balance there for me is you should be taking blood tests like with InsideTracker and getting information about your body that you can get from that data, and then make decisions based on that, and then that’s it. Pick the low-hanging fruit of that fruit tree that represents the problems of life.
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I guess what that horrible metaphor means is that you should fix the easy problems, and that means the things that are obviously wrong based on the data you collect from your blood. Okay, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Jeanne Rometty.
(05:22):
You worked at IBM for over 40 years, starting as a systems engineer, and you ran the company as chairman, president, and 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 a company of that size? Let’s start with a sort of big overview question.
Ginni Rometty (05:48):
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. It’s such a big company.
Lex Fridman (06:08):What was the parts 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.
Ginni Rometty (06:16):I’d be interested, do you have a perception of what you think it would be?
Lex Fridman (06:21):
Do I have a perception? Well, I’m a romantic for history of long-running companies, so there’s kind of a tradition. As a AI person, to me, IBM has some epic sort of research accomplishments where you show off Deep Blue and Watson, just impressive big moonshot challenges in accomplishing those. But that’s, I think, probably a small part of what IBM is. That’s mostly like the sexy public-facing part.
Ginni Rometty (06:51):
Yeah, no, 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 a company that does things that are essential to the world, meaning, 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, to this day, banks don’t run, 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.
Lex Fridman (07:36):Running the infrastructure of the world, so doing it at scale, doing it reliably.
Ginni Rometty (07:40):
And 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, it 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, can’t all be moonshots, because moonshots don’t always work, but mission-critical work.
Lex Fridman (08:29):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?
Ginni Rometty (08:48):
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, boy, there’s a premium on it, is speed, right? That in our industry, you gotta 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 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’d just do the same thing faster. If someone tells you, you’ve 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 gotta do something. And at first, 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 long journey of they sound like buzzwords, but if you really do them at scale, they’re hard, around things like agile.
(10:42):
And because you’ve really gotta change the way work gets done. And we ended up training, God, hundreds of thousands of people on that stuff. To really change it. On how to do agile, 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, 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 gotta get a lot of people to work that way.
Lex Fridman (11:18):The blunt club thing you’re talking about. So flatten the organization as much as possible.
Ginni Rometty (11:22):
Yeah, yeah, I probably reduced the layers of management by half. And so, that has lots of benefits, right? Time to a decision. More autonomy to people. And then, the idea of 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. It just comes back. And you gotta go back down and work on it. So it’s a natural thing.
But I hear so many people talk about it, Lex. This idea of, okay, 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.
Lex Fridman (12:06):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?
Ginni Rometty (12:21):
Oh, I am sure you know the answer to that. And it is, of course, yes. It’s 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 any time 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 really difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like, hey, we’re gonna 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 gotta 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.
Lex Fridman (13:18):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,
Ginni Rometty (13:32):
to step in and say, we have to do differently. When you gotta 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.
(14:02):
We needed a platform, the next platform here to be there. Skills, when I took over, if I, 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, that has to, 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, as she’s had to change, go back to what is them, them. And when you do that, that back to be essential, we kind of 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 hey, we better have new skills. Okay, now the next thing, how do you operationalize it? And it just takes some time, but you can engineer that, and get people to build belief.
Lex Fridman (15:02):And for the skills, that means hiring, and that means training?
Ginni Rometty (15:07):
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 gotta fit in these interviews, I gotta 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, spend more time on it. Then it was like, okay, hire experts, okay? Okay, hired a lot of experts over my life.
(15:49):
And 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. And when you’re in a really dynamic industry, that’s a problem. And so, okay, that was kind of my first revelation on this. And then when I looked to hiring, I can remember when I started my job, and we needed cyber people. And 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, and 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, and high school with a community college, we gave them internships, direction on curriculum. Lo and behold, we could hire these kids.
(16:49):
Hmm, 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, and I’m all for it. So you’re very, don’t, don’t. I’m deeply offended. No, you should not be. And I’m vice chair at Northwestern, one of the vice chairs. But 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. And so now for hiring, that’s kind of a long story to tell you, the number one thing I would hire for now is somebody’s willingness to learn. You know, and 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.
Lex Fridman (17:38):So the interview process, the questions you asked, everything changed. The kind of things you talked to them about is to try to get at how curious they are.
Ginni Rometty (17:46):
You can do testing, and I mean, we triangulated around it lots of ways. And now look, at the heart of it, what it would do is change. You don’t think of buying skills, you think of building skills. And when you think that way, with so many people, and I think this country, many developed countries being disenfranchised, you gotta bring them back into the workforce somehow, and they gotta get some kind of contemporary skills. And if you took that approach, you can bring them back into the workforce.
Lex Fridman (18:13):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. So 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.
Ginni Rometty (18:33):
You know, I saw it firsthand when we were beginning this path down the cloud in AI, and people would say, oh, IBM, it’s existential, they gotta change, and all these things. And I did hire a lot of people from outside, very willing to learn new things. Come on in, come on in. And I sometimes say, shiny objects, trained in shiny objects, come on in. But I saw something, it was another one of these, and you’re not a shiny object, I’m not saying that. But I learned something. Okay, some of them did fantastic.
(19:06):
And 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. I mean, they would not understand the certain kind of security and the auditability and everything they had to go on. And then I watched IBM people say, oh, I actually could learn something. Some were like, yeah, okay, I don’t know how to do, that’s a really good thing I could learn. And 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, and I saw it firsthand. So that’s why I’m so committed to this idea about skills first, and that’s how people should be hired, promoted, paid, you name it.
Lex Fridman (19:47):
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. So 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, we’re trying to figure it out. And that means constantly learning, taking risks, all of those things. And nobody’s really skilled in AI. It’s like,
Ginni Rometty (20:15):Because you have to keep evolving, right? You’re absolutely right. That’s right. Couldn’t agree more with you on that.
Lex Fridman (20:20):
You wrote in the book, so 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?
Ginni Rometty (21:09):
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 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, meaning 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 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. And 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. That to me, isn’t the kind that like when do you let go of stuff.
Lex Fridman (23:06):The values and relationships with clients.
Ginni Rometty (23:09):
Yeah, whatever you’re in service of. And the other thing was, I really felt it was really important to role model learning. So, 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 gonna make the first Friday of every month compulsory education.
And, okay, I mean everybody, like everybody, I don’t care what your job is. When the whole company has to transform, everybody’s gotta have some skin in this game and understand it. I taught the first hour of every month for four years. Now, okay, I had to learn something. But it made me learn. But I was like, okay, if I can teach this, you can do it, right? I mean, you know, that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (23:53):So it was a compulsory Thursday night education for you.
Ginni Rometty (23:56):Oh, I’m a little bit better prepared than that. But yes, you’re so right, yes.
Lex Fridman (24:00):Yeah. So you prepare. Yeah. That’s another habit. You like to prepare.
Ginni Rometty (24:05):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, you’re prepared, my friend. Yes, you are. You prepare for your interviews.
Lex Fridman (24:17):Sure. The rest you wing? Yeah, I wing.
Ginni Rometty (24:20):But that’s okay. I mean, you don’t have to prepare everything. I don’t prepare everything either.
Lex Fridman (24:23):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.
Ginni Rometty (24:38):That can be, that’s very true with some people.
Lex Fridman (24:39):
I mean, so I’m a programmer and engineer at heart. And so programmers famously overestimate, or underestimate, sorry, how long something’s going to take. And so I just, everything, I always underestimate. 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.
Ginni Rometty (25:07):
Yeah, it came from a few different places. I mean, one would have been as a kid, I think 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 don’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.
(26:01):
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 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.
Lex Fridman (26:43):But I watched the in the moment part. The negative example.
Ginni Rometty (26:46):
No, no, no. And I’m not going to change that. As he says, he’s a type C, I’m an A, okay? That’s how love works, yeah. And I have been married 43 years and that seems to work. But that idea that you could be in the moment with people is a really important thing.
Lex Fridman (26:49):
He’s a type C, I’m an A, okay? That’s how love works, yeah. 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. Well, 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?
Ginni Rometty (27:42):
I enjoyed it. So I’ll 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? And so 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? We’ll just do it. 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.
(28:30):
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, 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 asked 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.
(29:33):
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’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, 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.
(30:36):
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 in 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, 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 to, I think that hard work thing is really deeply rooted from that background.
Lex Fridman (31:37):And it gives you a way out from hard times.
Ginni Rometty (31:39):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 backup against,
Lex Fridman (31:52):Am I remembering? You have a story like that. You seem to like, at least certain moments in your life seem to do well in desperate times.
Ginni Rometty (32:03):
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, 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 is at a bar for bad. After this,
nothing’s bad. And it’s a very freeing thought.
Lex Fridman (32:34):The being able to take care of yourself, is that, you mean practically, or do you mean just the self-belief that I’ll figure it out?
Ginni Rometty (32:40):I’ll figure it out and practically both, right?
Lex Fridman (32:43):
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?
Ginni Rometty (33:14):
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, you know? 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 one really important thing is that there is always a way forward, always, and it’s in your control.
Lex Fridman (33:49):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.
Ginni Rometty (33:58):Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of my friends, and they worry, they say, gee, my kids have never had bad times. And so what happens here? So I don’t know, is it required? And why you end up, not required, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
Lex Fridman (34:12):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.
Ginni Rometty (34:23):If someone said that they think of me like one of the more profound sort of lessons I had, and the irony is, it’s from my husband, which is even more, you know, funny, actually.
Lex Fridman (34:33):You could just steal it.
Ginni Rometty (34:35):
I mean, you don’t have to give him credit. Oh, 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 as I write about it in the book, I’m mid-career, and I’d been running a pretty big business, actually, and the fella I work for is gonna get a new job. He’s gonna get promoted. He calls me and he says, hey, you’re gonna 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 gotta learn. That is like a huge job. Round 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.
(35:23):
I went to the interview the next day. Blah, blah, blah. Guy says to me, looks at me, and he says, I wanna offer you that job. And I said, I would like to think about it. I said, I wanna go home and talk to my husband about it. Kinda 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, hmm. He says, I know you. He’s like, six months, you’re gonna be bored. And 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? And for me, it internalized this feeling that, I am gonna 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.
(36:21):
And so this idea that I won’t grow unless I can feel uncomfortable, 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 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 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.
Now, I would take stock of the things I can do, 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.
Lex Fridman (37:02):100%, I’m still terrified.
Ginni Rometty (37:03):No, you’re not. But then it means you’re learning something, right? Putting it together. So that, to me, matters.
Lex Fridman (37:11):
I think it’s interesting. Maybe you could speak to that, the sort of the self-critical thing inside your brain. Because 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. Because 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.
Ginni Rometty (37:58):
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, 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. Oh.
Lex Fridman (38:21):So you write in the book. He’s just jumping around. Like I said, I’m a bit of a romantic. So how did you meet your husband?
Ginni Rometty (38:27):
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 at Northwestern, other Ivy League school, these very expensive schools. And I think you’d be a good fit. I am eternally thankful for that advice. I went and 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. It’s very romantic. Very, very romantic. And the person who owned the house said, 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.
Lex Fridman (39:35):
It was, the story was written. Yep. 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?
Ginni Rometty (39:53):
Yeah. 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 to 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 gotta 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, I can, don’t worry about getting to that actual exact endpoint. If I keep taking a step forward of progress, really tough stuff can get done. And so my view of that is like, 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 in 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.
(41:38):
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 110. So that essence of navigate tensions, do it respectfully, celebrate progress, and indulge me one more minute, these sort of, again, it’s retrospect that I, 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 is, says, if you’re gonna do something, change something, do something, you gotta be in service of something. Being in service of is really different than serving. Super different. And like, I just had my knee replaced. And I interviewed all these doctors. You can tell the difference of the guy who’s gonna do a surgery. Hey, my surgery’s fine. I really don’t care whether you can walk and do the stuff you wanted to do again, but, cause my surgery’s fine. Your hardware’s 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.
(43:01):
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 serves 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, cause I think it’s like so fundamental.
If people were really in service of something, you gotta 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 gotta hope you’ll voluntarily believe in a new future or 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 gotta do. In fact, pick up today’s, any newspaper, right? Chat GPT, you’re an AI guy.
(44:19):
All right? I believe one of the tenets of good tech is, it’s like responsibility for the long term. It says, so if you’re gonna 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.