Well, I'm really excited to welcome Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM and rock star member of the Technology CEO Council, who I love my opportunities to work with, to our virtual weird Wayne's World meets Meet the Press series. Let's talk about her fantastic new book, Good Power. Welcome, my friend.
Thank you, thank you. And thank you for reading it, Bruce. It's... I told you I didn't read it, you read it to me. I listened to it because I had a chance to get to know you. You're on this awesome whirlwind book tour, and as I mentioned to you, it's surprising to me how many people who are friends said, "Thanks for inviting me, but I either already heard or I've signed up to hear somewhere else." As with everything you've done in your life, per the book and per my interaction, if you're gonna do it, you may as well do it 10,000 percent. So it's going real well. I'd love to jump right in and ask you some questions.
From the reading of it, the very first anecdote and a foundation of your life clearly is when you were 16, your father abandoned your mom, who did not have a job, and you and your three siblings. That is brutal and certainly could devastate, does devastate so many families. Yet, as you relate, not only your story but all three of your siblings, everybody is a total superstar and went on to incredibly successful things. That's amazing grit and resilience. Something I often wonder about: is that something people are born with, or is it something you develop based on other circumstances? Why did you and your siblings thrive in such a difficult start while others crumble?
So, to Bruce's point, I do start this book on a very personal story, which most people find very surprising, and that's something I never really talked much about. But I do it for a reason, not to make someone feel sorry for us or be a victim. I start on the story of my dad abandoning us. Actually, I happened to walk into the garage and overhear him tell my mother, "I don't care whatever happens to you. I don't care what happens to the kids. You can go work on the street." And he would then leave us without a home, money, food, everything. My mom had never gone to college. When I was born, she was a kid having a kid, and she was 34 at the time with four children. So I start there, and I'll directly answer Bruce's question. My mom, I never saw her cry. She was just so determined, even though she had no education, that the story shouldn't end this way. So we would just observe it. It did a couple of things for me. First, it made us fiercely independent because we all watched this and said, "Man, I could never depend on someone else in my life. I've got to be able to take care of myself." Three of us are women, girls at the time, and we said, "You never rely on someone; that was a big mistake my mom made." The other thing: I also speak of my grandma and great-grandma, who suffered horrible tragedies yet would find a way through them. So to answer Bruce's question, I start there. Do I think it is nature or nurture? I think you have to go through some kind of adversity. It only has to be as traumatic as what I did, or maybe some of you did. I've had this conversation with Brené Brown, Bruce, about it. If I took a poll, how many people think to get where they got, they had to have suffered some tragedy or adversity? Her view is it has to be some kind of adversity for most people to get that kind of grit. I always say, for me, it set a bar for bad. After that, nothing else ever appeared bad to me. It's like, I've seen bad. I don't care what they do to me in any circumstance. If I have my husband, my health, my family, nothing's bad. So I start as a tribute to my mom because I would say Mom, Grandma, Great-Grandma taught us that hard work always makes a difference. I know people don't always believe that anymore, but hard work will make something better. My mom taught us never let someone define you. And then the silver thread that Bruce probably picked up in the book was that my mom wasn't dumb, but she had no access to education. So this idea that access and aptitude — and that's how Bruce and I got to know each other well — was all this work on skills first, hiring people for skills, not a college degree. Even though I'm vice chair at a university, by the way, it doesn't mean we come back to that topic. So I think it is a bit of... you have to have experienced something. So I don't think it's just nature. I think it's a bit of that nurture of what happens. I don't know, Bruce, what do you think? And your mom and dad are listening.
Yeah, it's like a lot of great parents. I'm blessed that I kind of come from a Leave It to Beaver background where I can't remember any adversity ever growing up. I mean, they had to listen to me practice the trumpet, so that was adversity for them. But the good news, I feel, is that for me, at least, it led to a very strong emotional grounding. I'm good there, but life didn't challenge me, and I'm lucky that it didn't. It allowed me to be lazy until I was less lazy. By the way, another hero — and again, the first couple of chapters are so amazing, in part because I knew you as a master of the universe and not this adversity growing up — but your father's brother, your uncle, who basically said, "I'm gonna do what's right, not what my knucklehead brother..." Uncle Sam? Or it's... yeah, my uncle Charlie. Yeah, Uncle Charlie. He's one of my heroes in the book. So let me back you up because I jumped into a philosophical question. But the book's called Good Power. I've read it. A lot of people here are gonna read it because, as always, they get no choice; you're giving it to them. Well, we're going to send everybody a link. You'll enter your mailing address, and the publishing people will mail it. Thank God we don't have to put it in the mail. But it's a wonderful read. If you don't mind, just a couple — I'm sure you've answered this one before — explain what is Good Power. And then also, is Good Power as a concept something that, as you were thinking about the story of your life, you realized is a framing mechanism? Or years into your job, or ten years ago, did it come up?
Look, I'm looking around at really accomplished people listening, so us talking among friends here. This is all retrospective, and I always say revisionist history is absolutely perfect. I'm very clear about that in the book. But we'll probably talk about why write a book, because I had never intended to write a book. Once I got into it, I thought, "I only want to write it if I can give people tips and ideas." Didn't always work out, but things that I thought were germane in this moment of time. So the idea of Good Power, which we backed into, was how to do really hard things but do them in a good way. By "good way," it meant you should be able to embrace people with differing opinions yet still make progress if you don't hunt for perfection, because that's very polarizing. And you should be able to do it with respect. That's kind of what I learned from lots of other people that I would hope to do. So it is all about that concept. There's actually a middle section because it's written in the power of me — like what do you enjoy, visually learn — the power of we when you start to care about somebody else, and the power of us — please don't give up on making societal change because I think all of us can do that, and anybody can do it if you don't get so fixated on polarization. So I felt like the moment was right for this, with such a divided world out there. I hope what I convey to some people is here's a set of reasonable tools that you can make an actual difference. The only way to do that and have it be... I learned through a horrible process that people are not interested in me telling them my opinion. I have to show it. That's what it took me two years to write a book, because they're like, "Okay, yeah, this is all interesting and very boring." And I'm like, "Well, let's not do it." They're like, "No, no, tell us how did you feel?" I'm like, "Are you serious? Feel? What were you thinking? Where did these decisions come from?" So begins this journey of introspection. That's why the book ended up in an entirely different place than where I started, because I really wanted to write about tips about leadership in these times, and I really wanted to write about that idea of skills over degrees. That was really what I wanted, with lots of good academic data in it. And they convinced me that that might be good, but no one would ever read it, and I had to go this other way. So it ends up as a memoir with purpose. It's not everything you need to know, so that's great. It's the things that would be useful is what I tried to do.
Oh, by the way, I'll disagree. I figured it was just more setting up the sequel. But I think you, and maybe you pick an Adam Grant or somebody, I think it'd be great to write about skills first and the learning and where things are going. Admittedly, it doesn't marry well with your personal life journey, other than the degree to which you focused on this. When you thought about writing your book, was there anybody who had written a similar business leadership autobiography that you thought, "That's kind of my model"?
I thought that... I'd be interested in other people's views. I thought Condi had some, how she'd written. I saw some, I didn't like because it was just like, "Hey, here's the story of how great I am." And I'm certainly not great, so I didn't feel that way. And I think if you ever listen to it or read it, it's not about that at all. People kept saying, "People only learn from your mistakes, not your glory of things you did right." So it took me to a very vulnerable place. There weren't many. Even the publisher at some point was like, "Well, wait, the case needs to be academic or pure memoir." They really struggled. Even when I ended up with this memoir with purpose, I say to myself, "Sometimes it's good to be different, and sometimes it's not good to be different, to be a thing in the middle, a compromise." But I'm hoping... so far it appears to have struck a chord. I was telling Bruce, I was filming Fareed Zakaria this morning, and Fareed was like, "What makes a difference is the personal side, actually." So I kind of feel like had I not aired over there, nobody would be reading this book right now. But Bruce, I would tell anybody here who wants to write a book, if I knew what I knew today, I would not do it.
I almost want to call BS on that. I understand it was way harder than you probably appreciated, although I was telling Ginni before this, the book's so well constructed that it reads so smoothly that the first instinct is, "Well, this sounds like it was pretty easy to write," because it flows so well. And I understand that that's because you know the definition... three times, yeah, right. But that aside, I hope it's not true that you wouldn't do it again. I mean, it's getting great acclaim. I think there are a lot of folks who are going to take away really important lessons, so I think it's a valuable contribution. When you... so there's both what you learned — that writing a book's a lot harder and it wasn't the book you thought it would be — but separate apart from that, do you feel like you learned anything about yourself or your own life that you never appreciated until this effort?
Yeah, so for anybody here thinking of it, I do think when you're forced into that deep of a retrospective, most of us are always doing, doing, doing something and don't really look back too often other than to learn lessons. I was a big lesson learner. To me, it's very clear in my post-retirement now why I do what I do. Those who know me that worked with me and knew me well said, "Well, I didn't know" — the personal part now that I've read it, a lot of things click as to why you do it, how you always were, why you were. And it is this biggest silver thread about access and aptitude, about education and skills, and how people learn. And Bruce, some of you know, maybe a couple of you know what I am working on now, something I started with Ken Chenault from Amex and Ken Frazier, Charles Phillips, Kevin Sharer from Amgen. It's called OneTen: one million Black employees over the next 10 years in family-sustaining jobs. But it only happens if the companies go look at all their good jobs and rewrite them for skills, because roughly half of them are over-inflated to require a college degree to start. That's kind of the premise: where you start should not determine where you end, which is what my whole life proved — in my mom's and my grandmas' and in my brothers and my sisters. So that's the silver thread that now is really clear. I tortured my sisters to learn all the time. When I had a babysitting business, that's like a thread. My whole life was apprenticing. I see the value of apprenticeships. I think they're so underused in this country. But anyways, hopefully we'll talk more about all that. But that's what I learned: there's a silver thread. And I suspect for everybody watching, there is some silver thread, especially when you go to this — I feel like I'm dying when I say this phase of your life — but there's this time when you just make a decision of another chapter and what to do. For me, Lou Gerstner, who I had worked for many years — some of you might remember Lou, kind of the storied leader that led IBM — when I was getting ready to retire, he said, "Come see me, and I'll give you your counseling on retirement." The first time I went, I gave him this long litany of things that people were suggesting I might do. And he says, "Well, okay, you get a big F in this conversation." He's like, "After a whole life like this, you have to go back and think about what you've accumulated, what should be at the center of a bullseye." And then he did put my husband at the second ring, not the first ring. My husband would like to be at the center, but... and then there'll be a few other things. That eventually got an A-plus, by the way, but it took a while. But that thought particularly hangs together on when you write a book and why. So anyways, back to you. I rambled off. I told Bruce I wouldn't ramble. Go ahead.
I enjoy it. I hope others did too. I actually never read Gerstner's Who Says Elephants Can't Dance or Welch. I had in mind a little bit of one of the all-time greats: Phil Knight's Shoe Dog, which I think is becoming a movie now, which is cool. And I love Michael... that's an unbelievable story. That one and Michael Dell's most recent book, which I liked because it would toggle between his early days and then the modern days. Phil Knight's book, startup stuff, has kind of energy. Yours reminded me a bit of Ursula Burns's book, where neither of you started the company but you both led it through really similar challenging times, and you both came from pretty hard backgrounds. That's true. She was nice enough to do one of these talks with us too, although it was before her book. So within your career, it seems like going into this, I knew you had two things going for you, and the book convinced me of a third thing. Number one: I know you're really smart. A lot of that's genetic, good luck, because your siblings are clearly really bright, your mom's really bright. So okay, good genetics — sometimes you win the lottery, sometimes you lose. Number two: you work harder than anybody I've ever met. That is a choice, although it's a sacrifice because you give up lots and lots of other things to choose that. But number three: I didn't necessarily know, but I thought you did a really nice job of highlighting all the great mentors you had. Something I wonder: the book didn't make clear whether you went seeking out mentors or they spotted you as a rising talent. For a lot of people mid-career or even early career, do you wait by the phone? Is a mentor gonna find you? If you're a leader right now, do you have to find five people to mentor? How does that sort of relationship happen, because yours were unbelievably valuable advocates for you, helped your rise, but I didn't know how the connections began.
Yeah, so again, I'm looking around at very accomplished people here, so everyone's got their view on this topic. I have a view slightly different. I did happen to do Adam Grant last night, and I have a different view than some of the people I've heard in interviews. You do find each other. I never thought about one, and I never ever called them "You're my mentor." I heard someone say the mentor should be the person you could tell everything to. I think to myself, that might only be my husband and my general counsel because he's bound by law. Even then, be careful. So that was never brought to me. I also felt the reason I pay so much tribute to these people is that I am a mosaic of them because of their generosity of caring. So I always say to people, mentors are anyone that you will learn from. If you show someone you'll learn from them, whether they use the word doesn't ever matter; they in effect will be your mentor. If you actually speak to someone with an idea of learning from them, people can tell the difference — when you're just speaking at them or trying to tell them something versus you're actually listening to learn something. I always viewed relationships as what could I give before what could I get. From the very beginning, someone told me very early in my career: if anyone ever asks you for help, you give it and never expect something in return. If you live a life that way — it's trust, it's not naive — it comes back to you. These are never transactional. Never look at these moments as in the moment transactional. So my point on mentors: I would just look at everyone like, "Okay, what did I really like?" And I was constantly about that, listening carefully, asking good questions, and that listen to learn. I think so many people do not listen to learn. I can't stand it when I'm at a cocktail party and someone's talking to you and you can tell they're actually looking over your shoulder looking for someone more interesting to come along. I'm like, "Okay, they're not even hearing a word." So that listening to learn, being in the moment, and everyone you can learn from — then you get adopted by lots of people. I feel like that's what happened to me, Bruce. I got adopted. I didn't put myself up for adoption, but that engenders that between people.
