Ginni Rometty on Good Power (Mar 23 2023)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a very good question because honestly, I didn't do a good enough job about that early on in my life. A little bit of it was because I was planning to help plenty and adopt and teach from that sense. Yes, I was always teaching. But this idea of being a role model to help people that would come to me later in life — originally, some of us, I'm looking at a few women in the audience, I think the very... I'm a product of the '70s and '80s. I would be like, "Please do not mention I'm a woman. Please do not go there. Recognize me for what I do. Do not go down that path." At some point, I can remember still to this day the experience: I give back what I think is a fantastic financial services presentation. A man comes up to me and says, "I wish my daughter could have seen..." I'm thinking he's going to ask me something about my brilliant points. In that moment, I start to... I can remember it because it felt very watershed to me. I would start to say, "Hey, this isn't really about me. People can't be what they can't see. I had better start acting like a role model and not be so selfish about this topic." So a little bit related to your question of when did I... I think after that, I played a far more active role in my life on that topic.

So I'm either going to make a lot of friends or enemies, I don't know. This is how I would get to know Hank Paulson very well, by the way, on a lot of this topic, because we were one of the very first multinationals here. Like some of you, maybe I can't even tell you how many times I have been to China — 50, I don't know, countless. I always say to people, nothing is as it appears, and there are no coincidences in China. When we landed, if the plane had a good parking spot, there was a reason. If you didn't, there was a reason. I'll tell you where I was and where I am on this, Bruce. I was a big believer that the way to work with China back then was... I believe strongly in free trade. The best thing is to be the best innovator at what you do. I didn't believe you serve at their behest as a commercial company if you have a license to live there, as long as you can do something they can't do and keep going and just keep raising the bar about what it is that you do. I would even — and this is the reason, we were talking a moment ago about the point about chips wars, you were talking about you would interview the chip board person, and I'm in that book for a reason. I even really believe the best way to keep world peace is this idea of interrelated trade, even for the financial systems. IBM made the systems that still run their banks today, and that we would be better off because it's the number one import to China to let them make chips — not the kind that can run AI, so above 14 nanometer, okay, not the super chips below — and to try to help them do that. Now they failed miserably at that; we can come back to all of this. But when Xi entered the picture, a couple dynamics just all happened at once. I felt that Xi coming in, I will vividly remember being in a very small meeting with his group of seven, one of the seven, and being lectured. I was like, "Oh, this is the first time I'm being lectured on how bad we are." And I'm thinking, "We're not bad." But it was such a moment to check: times are going to change. And they do start to change with how he views things. Then I fought so hard for TPP because I really believed the best way to keep China in check is this multilateral viewpoint of everybody staying together, band together. Then that goes to the wayside. Then certainly President Trump had a view about bilateral versus multilateral, which I still think multi is better when you're dealing with this kind of thing. So over time, in my book, it now becomes less of a win-win, very much less of an ability to have a win-win with China, which is where I think we're at now. I think we're in a position now where you would, on one hand, strongly have to protect your IP, but I could come back to a thought about that. Second, fiercely compete. And thirdly, I still think we should cooperate on things like the environment and things that we could find common ground on. If you leave it in an isolated position, I'm one of the ones that doesn't believe that is the right thing to do. That goes back to listening to learn, where you will get with this. So where we're headed right now is not a very good place for me. I think it's a horrible place. I feel some of those activities that transpired accelerated something that was maybe inevitable — Xi in power — it happened sooner. We could have at least in a lot of ways pushed it out a bit. I hope I never see the issue with Taiwan in my life, but I don't know that it's inevitable. It would be a race: can we build chips in other places faster? I don't know that we can beat that in time. I saw a really interesting article — you guys are in Washington, and I don't always read every one of them, but it was in U.S. Affairs just last week, I think, saying, "Before all of you think that the way they've gotten some prowess is because they are so good at stealing, be careful." What has grown, and I think this is a really good point, is their process expertise. The example was an iPhone had 5% value add to the Chinese; now it's 25% value add. This is true why it's so hard to move out of China: they built these ecosystems of pretty high sophisticated parts that can go into things. So where do I think it's headed? I hope we can stop it from a brink. I think that can only happen if the world — many of our friends, they don't have to be friends you agree with on everything — act together in our positions.

Yeah, no. That's an interesting point. I'm not sure if Alan and I agree or disagree on this topic. I'd be very curious, Bruce, of your view after I answered this. I still stay in touch with many of my active friends through a lot of vehicles. I would say they're not changing what they're doing because of this rhetoric; they change how they talk about it. But beneath, the reason is because most of us do what we did because it was good for our companies as well. We live at this intersection of business and society. I always felt that way. I felt that if you're 112, 113 years old, if you're going to be that long, society gives you the license to operate; it can revoke the license. I've had that discussion with Doug McMillon at Walmart. What happens when you get on the wrong side of society? It can take a long time to come back. Good companies do the right thing for employees, partners, customers, communities, and never pleasing everyone. One of the themes of the book is about tension: you never please everyone. These are always about... I always would say, and this is where I say to Alan, and never found something — we've had this discussion — media, politics, they get to put everything black and white. It was never a world we got to live in. It's never black and white. We always dealt in the gray, always between all these constituents. In the arc of time, you make the right decisions in the long term. So I think it's more important. I don't really feel a lot of our colleagues did... a few, yes. I think the ones that went off the rails might have been the few that hadn't really thought through their own framework about what was important. I know my old IBM teams on the phone, we thought through what we cared about: things that impacted trust people had in us, things that impacted preparing society to thrive with technology, or things about diversity and inclusion — not because we thought it was a wonderful altruistic thing, but a deeply rooted belief that we get the best products, best company, best team, best outcome if we get the most diverse, inclusive team. So when people talk to me now about DEI, I'm like, "Look, if you don't authentically believe it, this conversation is going to go nowhere." Then you should be on the list in the poster child list of what you're doing, but I authentically believed it. So I don't really care about that stuff. The reason I pick bathroom bills — we did, Chris Padilla helped me on this — it was a matter: we were the biggest employer in Texas and North Carolina, and we had people very upset about not being able to feel like they could be themselves at work. So we chose those to make a point. Again, didn't tweet and blah blah, which is also what I felt was wrong back, Bruce. Your point: I really felt the way to get something happen in Washington or in any state was a ground war. Go speak to the rep, speak to them in terms they understand. Chris will remember the conversation with the governor about sometimes you do have to say, "Okay, if you do that, I will do this. You might not like that outcome." And draw a line. I did find that unfortunately true in several situations, but we made the point. So I don't get upset about all that conversation about woke and this and that, because I think most people are focused on this stuff for really good reasons. They believe in it in their company. I'm sorry that this is another polarizing point for this country, because it should not be. We have so many more important things to work on.

Thank you. But that's also hardened. I do understand the pressure. Over the voting, do you remember that decision? Oh, yeah, colleagues that were writing the bullseye right away because of the speed at which some of this flies. I am empathetic to that. But by the way, guys, I do talk a lot. I actually dedicated a chapter to this topic. One of the five principles was about stewarding good tech. Everybody's a tech company now, and therefore these issues, especially with ChatGPT right now — I mean, I get asked a lot about that. I'm more than concerned; I'm more prescriptive about it because I felt like I learned so much. Can I branch on that one second, just on ChatGPT? I'm assuming almost everybody here listening to us today has probably tried it. I asked it the first question: "Who's Mark Rometty?" That's my husband. It comes back and tells me everything he did to do a fine job running IBM. I showed it to my husband, and he's like, "Oh, I finally get the credit I deserve." But okay, now look, I've been running it like 10 years; it was not new news to ChatGPT, but wrong. So my big learning over our years with AI — we started with some of the hardest problems, we started with cancer and oncology, but it's very instructive — is it's all about trust. If you introduce these technologies and can build trust in them, I think that's a big question mark right now because ChatGPT is so authoritative yet it can often be wrong, and it will be for a very long time. So the idea of good tech is manage the upside and the downside in parallel. If you're going to put something out, and the CEO of it has said, "Hey, don't do anything important with this," but no one's listening to him; it's already at 100 million people. So watermark it or something and say, "Hey, been created with ChatGPT." It would have been symbolically to come out and do things like, "Hey, this paper has an 80% chance it was written this way." Because it is going to change a lot of things. But I just feel we've got to be more thoughtful on its introduction, even though the cat's out of the bag. We're not going to stop it. But then things like precision regulation — Chris coined that term on our government team — about where should it be used, where shouldn't it be used, guardrails on these things. We have a lot of work we should be doing, not just talking about it. A lot of people say, "Regulate us." I'm like, "Okay, well, what do you want to have happen?" That's not very instructive. So what regulation would we do? I would do some regulation around its use, not just the technology itself. I think it's good to not let certain countries have access to chips below 14 nanometers that will allow them to run more of this. So there are a lot of real things we could do. I don't even know how I got on this topic other than it's on my mind. It's just an example about how to work with government and be pragmatic. One last thing I want to say: some of you are in DC. The other thing I felt I learned over the years was that the one currency that was common in every country was jobs. In every lawmaker, most of what we do centers around eventually people in jobs. Almost every darn one of us. If you could stay on that... I always remember this conversation I had with Shimon Peres. It was a three-hour conversation late in his life. He said many things I read about before, but one thing he said was, "Companies do more to develop countries than the countries themselves and government, because they know no boundaries." It always stuck with me and is so profound. If I could go back to all the work Bruce and I did together, we could start from a place that we were common in what we believed in, which was a better future. Because I am really worried for America and democracy that many people do not think they have a better future, and it's mathematically correct. So anyways, that was what I learned working with government.

All right, this will be a good one. For me, I feel I would like to enlist you all in this movement in any business you run or any person you talk to. You already heard the story of my mom, so I thought my mom skills... I will fast forward to shorten it. 2012: looking for cyber people; they don't really exist in the marketplace; it's a brand new big field. Walk into another meeting, serendipity. It is corporate social responsibility: a poor school in Brooklyn, very bad neighborhood. We're working with a community college and them. We give them a curriculum, give them some internships, tell them give them a chance at a job. Lo and behold, these couple kids do start doing pretty well. They got associate degrees. Next year come back, I say, "Hey, how many did we hire?" "Oh, eight." Out of three? I can't remember the numbers, like teeny number. I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "Well, 95% of our jobs require a PhD or an undergraduate degree from a fine institution." I said, "But these people seem to be doing quite well." So it would begin with Chris and others on my team a 15-year journey. Thank God I had an HR team that came to believe it. We'd say, "Well, okay, we better go look at those job specs." Now, remember, when you're our size, this is a big number of them. This would be a five-year journey of looking at them. The first reaction of a workforce is, "Hey, you're dumbing us down, bringing in these people." So we go study it. Of course, engineers, we find: first year, they're a little less productive than you arrogant guys; after that, they're equal or better. They take more education, more loyal, more retentive. 75% went back and got degrees. Like, okay, what's wrong with this picture? And 95% Black and Hispanic, which I wanted a more inclusive workforce. I know everyone says you can't find them. Oh, there they are — first generation. I really became, as you can tell, a convert. Every country in the world has the same problem. I remember who I asked, Christopher's you: "What percentage of people do not have a college degree in a developed nation?" I wish I could have a poll here: 65%. I would see the murder of George Floyd. What percentage of Black Americans don't have a college degree? 80%. Okay. What percentage of our jobs that are good, that could sustain a family of four? 85% need a college degree. Well, we would then learn about half our jobs were over-credentialed. IBM went from 95% requiring a degree to 50%. Doesn't mean you don't eventually need one, but where you start should not determine where you end. Then again, just serendipity: I'm on a thing at MIT, future of work. I look at real data, and it's showing this barbell effect in our country. The college grads over here are making lots of money; everybody else has shifted down to the other end. There's no middle class left. I'm generalizing, but that's the no middle class left. Down here, you're making less money, and you're like, "I'm not sure democracy works for me. Let's vote for something else, or let's protest, or let's do something else." This is why I think this is a pragmatic way forward. You can't wait for everybody to go to college. I'm not against the American dream. I am a vice chair at Northwestern; I am all for it. That is not it. I was a great benefactor, but we don't have time. So this would lead me down, and IBM down, this journey. Great people. Now those little schools we were playing around with — this is just one pathway — there are 300 in the world, 150,000 kids, 30 countries. New York just approved another $35 million because these kids get associate degrees at the same time when they're in high school as fast as they can. You would be shocked at how many kids are coming out in four years with an associate degree and a high school degree. A little bit of a problem when you hire them: they're not 18 yet. But that's a different issue. So anyways, I'll stop. I feel that's what I work on now. How it happened was on the sad murder of George Floyd, my great colleagues, as I said where I started our talk, Bruce, they said, "Hey, we should do what business does best. Forget about tweeting and giving money; we should find jobs." But then it was like, "Great idea, but they didn't have the house." So today, Ken Frazier and I co-chair this group, OneTen: 1 million Black employees in 10 years. He had the vision; he was the what. I am the how, or he is the visionary and I'm the plumber of the team, because I'm like, "Ah, skills first is exactly the way to attack this." People like Walmart — fantastic progress and lots of pathways. By the way, apprenticeships: this country doesn't use enough apprenticeships. I don't know if it's been updated: Germany's 19%, Canada's 11%. This is crazy stuff. With so many people going to have to reskill now, back to ChatGPT in the world of AI and all this stuff, man, we better all go back to school and be lifelong learners. We will. You could tweak — this is how Bruce and I met each other, on Perkins Act, which took seven years to get fixed. Very simple point: if a community college gets funding, it should teach something that industry needs. I know that's a profound thought, but that was not how it was. They could just keep putting out cosmetologists instead of what industry needed. So like that was a very basic... we can make all these little tweaks. We have a whole list of them that would really help the country. So we are going to keep going on that topic. That's maybe a good... you're probably thinking, "Oh, I didn't come here for this." But that's really the power of us. There are so many great companies — Delta, Cleveland Clinic — they're all working on this now, and they all have found the same experience. I'm just a little bit ahead of them on this. Power of us, back on message. Well done.

Sure, no. I think that's a great... if we all voted, I think you know... there is true. I mean, Paul Polman — did you have Paul come and talk about his book? Because he just did this survey, and it's like, "What is Gen Z and Millennial and Gen Z and whatever the next one is, Alpha, looking for?" An authentic employer. They want them to be focused on not just... I didn't like "greater good" that's not attached to the business. It's doing the business in that context of solving big issues, is how I would put it. And focused on things like well-being. That doesn't seem odd to me. I think the reality is, I say to people, "Look, you don't get to do that 100% of the day." If you can do it 20%, that's a really good job. When you're focused on exactly what your main mission and purpose is, you make that choice. I think employers have to convince you that that is what they can offer you to do. You earn people staying. So I don't think it's unrealistic for people to go look for that. I'll end: one of the things I end the book with is a handwritten letter, which is kind of one of my signature things — I still handwrite notes. I said that on one hand, I talk very much about the very hard transition I had to make and what I learned from making that transition of IBM, which was behind and had to move to the future. But I end with: "What you might be remembered for just may be how you did your work, not what you did." That is to me the purpose of Good Power. Be careful how you do it; it may matter just as much as what you actually achieved at the very end of the day. To me, that's very germane in politics right now. Be careful. That's how I feel about how I'd like to work for someone.