IBM's Ginni Rometty on taking risks

And when I think about all the years of what I've learned, I think of a quote that I often hear from Sam, and what he always says is: nothing is inevitable. Right, and so I don't believe in the inevitable. So what it means is when you don't believe in the inevitable, you don't expect that that's how things have to turn out. You can change them. And I think what it's led to, what I have learned from it, is this idea: whatever business you're in, it doesn't matter, it's going to commoditize over time, it's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value, keep going to a higher value in whatever it is that you do, and force yourself and the organization to always do it ahead of time.

I will tell a story that I learned in maybe the same spirit. We all have a lot of mentees here, or people we mentor, and many of you are so accomplished. But when you say what keeps you fresh, I remember, and I want to connect two stories really. Early, early in my career, I can remember being offered a big job. I can remember my reaction to the person who offered it to me. I right away said, "You know what, I'm not ready for this job. I need more time, I need more experience, and then I could really do it well." So I said to him, "I need to go home and think about it." I went home that night. I've been married 32 years now, and my husband at the time, as usual, I'm blah blah blah, and he's just sitting there. As I'm telling him about this, and I told him I would get back to them tomorrow, he said to me, he looked at me and he just looked at me and he said, "Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?" And I sort of sat there. It taught me a lesson. He said, "I know you. You go do it. Six months you're going to be bored. My goodness, why didn't you?" And what it taught me, and it's related to how you stay fresh, what it taught me was you have to be very confident even though you're so self-critical inside about what it is you may or may not know. And that to me leads to taking risks, because I think it's easy for people to say, "Take a risk, take a risk," but I think it goes a little deeper. In my experience, as I have talked to women around the world, it doesn't matter what country I'm in, if I share that personal story, it resonates because people are their first worst critic and it stops them from getting another experience. Because it's, "I could be better, I wasn't ready yet, if I had one more thing..." And that's not it. And I always say, you know, if I sit here and close my eyes and say when did I learn the most in my life, in my career, it'll always be when I close them and everything I think of is when I took a risk. That's when I think I learned the most. So it's a personal story of how you stay fresh at it: you always have to do something that puts you in a zone you don't know. Someone once told me, growth and comfort do not coexist. And I think it's a really good thing to remember.