Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity

00:00:00.000 | I've had to do plenty of unpopular things. I think anytime you have to run a company that endures

00:00:04.800 | a century and has to endure another century, you will do unpopular things. You have no choice.

00:00:10.400 | And I often felt I had to sacrifice things for the long term. And whether that would have been

00:00:16.000 | really difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like,

00:00:22.240 | "Hey, we're going to change the way we do our semiconductors," and a whole different philosophy,

00:00:29.360 | you have no choice. And in times of crisis as well, you got to be...

00:00:33.040 | I would say it's not a popularity contest.

00:00:35.040 | The following is a conversation with Jeannie Vermetti, who was a longtime CEO,

00:00:41.680 | president, and chairman of IBM. And for many years, she was widely considered to be one of

00:00:46.720 | the most powerful women in the world. She's the author of a new book on power, leadership,

00:00:52.800 | and her life story called "Good Power," coming out on March 7th. She is an incredible leader

00:01:00.880 | and human being, both fearless and compassionate. It was a huge honor and pleasure for me to sit

00:01:07.200 | down and have this chat with her. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it,

00:01:12.320 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeannie Vermetti.

00:01:19.280 | You worked at IBM for over 40 years, starting as a systems engineer, and you ran the company

00:01:24.880 | as chairman, president, and CEO from 2011 to 2020. IBM is one of the largest tech companies in the

00:01:31.840 | world with, maybe you can correct me on this, with about 280,000 employees. What are the biggest

00:01:39.760 | challenges running the company of that size? Let's start with a sort of big overview question.

00:01:45.280 | The biggest challenges I think are not in running them, it's in changing them.

00:01:48.640 | And that idea to know what you should change and what you should not change. Actually, people don't

00:01:54.320 | always ask that question. What should endure, even if it has to be modernized, but what should endure?

00:01:59.360 | And then I found the hardest part was changing how work got done at such a big company.

00:02:04.720 | What was the parts that you thought should endure? The core of the company that was beautiful and

00:02:10.480 | powerful and could persist through time, that should persist through time.

00:02:13.520 | I'd be interested, do you have a perception of what you think it would be?

00:02:16.080 | Do I have a perception? Well, I'm a romantic for a history of long running companies,

00:02:23.040 | so there's kind of a tradition as a AI person. To me, IBM has some epic sort of research

00:02:31.600 | accomplishments where you show off, you know, Deep Blue and Watson, just impressive big moonshot

00:02:39.440 | challenges and accomplishing those. But that's, I think, probably a small part of what IBM is.

00:02:44.400 | That's mostly like the sexy public facing part.

00:02:48.160 | Yeah. Well, certainly the research part itself is over 3,000, so it's not that small. That's

00:02:54.320 | a pretty big research group. But the part that should endure ends up being a company that does

00:03:01.040 | things that are essential to the world. Meaning, think back, you said you're a romantic. It was

00:03:09.200 | the '30s, the social security system. It was putting the man on the moon. It was, you know,

00:03:13.680 | to this day, banks don't run, railroads don't run. That is at its core, it's doing mission

00:03:21.360 | critical work. And so that part, I think, is at its core, it's a business to business company.

00:03:26.720 | And at its core, it's about doing things that are really important to the world becoming running and

00:03:32.640 | being better. Running the infrastructure of the world, so doing it at scale, doing it reliably.

00:03:37.360 | Yes, secure in this world, that's like everything. And in fact, when I started,

00:03:41.200 | I almost felt people were looking for what that was. And together, we sort of, in a word,

00:03:45.680 | it was to be essential. And the reason I love that word was I can't call myself essential.

00:03:51.280 | You have to determine I am, right? So it was to be essential, even though some of what we did is

00:03:56.240 | exactly what you said, it's below the surface. So many people, because people say to me, well,

00:03:59.600 | what does IBM do now? Right? And over the years, it's changed so much. And today, it's really a

00:04:06.240 | software and consulting company. Consulting is a third of it. And the software is all hybrid cloud

00:04:12.160 | and AI. That would not have been true, as you well know, back even two decades ago, right? So

00:04:17.200 | it changes. But I think at its core, it's that be essential. You said moonshot, can't all be

00:04:22.560 | moonshots because moonshots don't always work, but mission critical work.

00:04:26.400 | So given the size, though, when you started running it, did you feel the sort of thing that

00:04:35.280 | people usually associate with size, which is bureaucracy, and maybe the aspect of size that

00:04:41.680 | hinder progress or hinder pivoting, did you feel that? - You would, for lots of reasons. I think

00:04:47.920 | when you're a big company, sometimes people think of process as the client themselves.

00:04:53.280 | I always say to people, your process is not your customer. There is a real customer here that you

00:04:59.760 | exist for. And that's really easy to fall into because people are a master to this process. And

00:05:07.360 | that's not right. And when you're big, the other thing, and boy, there's a premium on it, is speed,

00:05:13.760 | right? That in our industry, you got to be fast. And go back, like when I took over and it was 2012,

00:05:20.800 | we had a lot of catching up to do and a lot of things to do, and it was moving so fast. And as

00:05:26.800 | you well know, all those trends were happening at once, which made them go even faster. And so

00:05:31.920 | pretty unprecedented, actually, for that many trends to be at one time. And I used to say to

00:05:36.480 | people, "Go faster, go faster, go faster." And honestly, I've tired them out. I mean,

00:05:43.440 | it kind of dawned on me that when you're that big, that's a really valuable lesson. And it taught me

00:05:49.360 | the how's perhaps more important than the what. Because if I didn't do something to change how

00:05:54.560 | work was done, like change those processes or give them new tools, help them with skills,

00:05:59.360 | they couldn't. They'll just do the same thing faster. If someone tells you, "You've got hiking

00:06:05.280 | boots," and they're like, "No, go run a marathon." You're like, "I can't do it in those boots."

00:06:09.040 | But so you've got to do something. And at first, I think the ways for big companies,

00:06:14.880 | I would call them like blunt clubs. You do what everyone does. You reduce layers. Because if you

00:06:19.280 | reduce layers, decisions go faster. It's math. If there's less decision points, things go faster.

00:06:25.600 | You do the blunt club thing. And then after that, though, it did lead me down a long journey of,

00:06:33.440 | they sound like buzzwords, but if you really do them at scale, they're hard, around things like

00:06:37.600 | agile. Because you've really got to change the way work gets done. And we ended up training,

00:06:44.880 | God, hundreds of thousands of people on that stuff to really change it.

00:06:48.400 | - Correctly. - On how to do it correctly.

00:06:50.480 | That's right. Because everybody talks about it. But the idea that you would really have small,

00:06:55.120 | multidisciplinary teams work from the outside in, set those sort of interim steps, take the

00:07:01.760 | feedback pivot, and then do it on not just products, do it on lots of things. It's hard to

00:07:07.280 | do at scale. People always say, "Oh, I got this agile group over here of 40 people." But not when

00:07:12.560 | you're a couple hundred thousand people. You got to get a lot of people to work that way.

00:07:15.760 | - The blunt club thing you're talking about. So flatten the organization as much as possible.

00:07:19.600 | - Yeah, yeah. I probably reduced the layers of management by half.

00:07:22.320 | And so that has lots of benefits, right? Time to a decision, more autonomy to people. And then

00:07:31.680 | the idea of faster clarity of where you're going. Because you're not just filtered through so many

00:07:37.520 | different layers. And I think it's the kind of thing a lot of companies, if you're big,

00:07:42.720 | have to just keep going through. It's kind of like grass grows. It just comes back,

00:07:46.080 | and you got to go back town and work on it. So it's a natural thing. But I hear so many people

00:07:52.240 | talk about it, Lex, this idea of like, "Okay, well, who makes a decision?" You've often heard,

00:07:56.480 | "Nobody can say yes, and everybody can say no." And that's actually what you're trying to get out

00:08:01.040 | of a system like that. - So, I mean, your book in general,

00:08:06.320 | the way you lead is very much about we and us, the power of we. But is there times when a

00:08:12.560 | leader has to step in and be almost autocratic, take control and make hard, unpopular decisions?

00:08:17.840 | - Oh, I am sure you know the answer to that. And it is, of course, yes.

00:08:21.600 | - It's just fun to hear you say it. - It's fun to say it. Yeah. You know,

00:08:24.400 | 'cause I actually, A, there's a leader for a time, but then there's a leader for a situation,

00:08:29.840 | right? And so I've had to do plenty of unpopular things. I think anytime you have to run a company

00:08:35.440 | that endures a century and has to endure another century, you will do unpopular things. You have

00:08:40.720 | no choice. And I often felt I had to sacrifice things for the long-term. And whether that would

00:08:46.880 | have been really difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like,

00:08:53.520 | "Hey, we're gonna change the way we do our semiconductors," and a whole different philosophy,

00:08:59.600 | you have no choice. I mean, and in times of crisis as well, you gotta be... I always said it's not a

00:09:05.200 | popularity contest. So that's... None of these jobs are popularity contests. I don't care if

00:09:10.480 | your company's got one person or half a million. They're not popularity contests.

00:09:14.960 | - But psychologically, is it difficult to just sort of step in as a new CEO and...

00:09:19.920 | 'Cause you're fighting against tradition, against all these people that act like experts of their

00:09:25.680 | thing, and they are experts of their thing, to step in and say, "We have to do it differently."

00:09:29.840 | - Yeah. When you gotta change a company, it's really tempting to say, "Throw everything else

00:09:34.400 | out." Back to that, what must endure, right? But I know when I took over to start, I knew how much

00:09:39.040 | had to change. The more I got into it, I could see, wow, a lot more had to change, right? 'Cause

00:09:44.160 | we needed a platform. We'd always done our best when we had a platform, a technology platform.

00:09:49.280 | You will go back in time and you'll think of the mainframe systems. You'll think of the PC. You'll

00:09:53.840 | think of perhaps middleware. You could even call services a platform. We needed a platform,

00:10:00.080 | the next platform here to be there. Skills. When I took over, we inventoried who had modern skills

00:10:07.200 | for the future. It was two out of 10 people for the future. Not that they didn't have relevant

00:10:10.880 | skills today, but for the future, two out of 10. Yikes, that's a big problem, right? The speed at

00:10:16.160 | which things were getting done. So you got so much to do, and you say, "Is that a scary thing?" Yes.

00:10:23.360 | Do you have to sometimes dictate? Yes. But I did find, and it is worth it. I know every big company

00:10:29.760 | I know. My good friend that runs General Motors, she's had to change. Go back to what is them,

00:10:36.160 | them. When you do that, that back to be essential, we started with, "Hey, it's be essential." Then

00:10:42.560 | the next thing I did with the team was say, "Okay, now this means new era of computing,

00:10:46.560 | new buyers are out there, and we better have new skills. Okay, now the next thing,

00:10:50.880 | how do you operationalize it?" It just takes some time, but you can engineer that and get people to

00:10:58.560 | build belief. For the skills, that means hiring and it means training? Yes. Oh boy, that's a long,

00:11:06.560 | skills is a really long topic in and of itself. I try to put my view in it. I learned a lot,

00:11:11.040 | and I changed my view on this a lot. I'll go back at my very beginning, say 40 years ago,

00:11:17.840 | I would have said at that point, "Okay." I was always in a hurry. I was interviewing to hire

00:11:23.600 | people. I don't know how you hire people. 40 years ago, I'd be like, "Okay, I got to fit in these

00:11:27.600 | interviews. I got to hire someone to get this done." Then time would go on. I'm like, "Oh,

00:11:31.520 | that's not very good." In fact, someone once said to me, "Hey, hire the best people to work for you,

00:11:35.440 | and your job gets a lot easier. Okay, I should spend more time on this topic, spend more time

00:11:39.760 | on it." Then it was like, "Okay, hire experts." Okay, hired a lot of experts over my life.

00:11:45.520 | Then I was really like an epiphany, and it really happened over my tenure running the

00:11:51.760 | company and having to change skills. If someone's an expert at something and has just done that for

00:11:56.560 | 30 years, the odds of them really wanting to change a lot are pretty low. When you're in a

00:12:02.560 | really dynamic industry, that's a problem. Okay, that was my first revelation on this.

00:12:08.960 | Then when I looked to hiring, I can remember when I started my job, we needed cyber people.

00:12:14.960 | I go out there and I look. Unemployment in the US was almost 10%. Can't find them. Okay, it's 10%,

00:12:20.880 | and I can't find the people. Okay, what's the issue? Okay, they're not teaching the right

00:12:24.560 | things. That led me down a path, and it was serendipity that I happened to do a review of

00:12:31.040 | corporate social responsibility. We had this one little fledgling school in a low-income area,

00:12:36.160 | and high school with a community college, we gave them internships, direction on curriculum.

00:12:41.440 | Lo and behold, we could hire these kids. I said, "Hmm, this is not CSR. I just found a new talent

00:12:48.720 | pool," which takes me to now what I'm doing in my post-retirement. I'm like, "This idea that don't

00:12:55.280 | hire just for a college degree," we had 99% of our hires were college and PhDs, and I'm all for it.

00:13:02.240 | So you're very, "Don't, don't."

00:13:04.480 | I'm deeply offended.

00:13:05.520 | No, you should not be. I'm vice chair at Northwestern, one of the vice chairs.

00:13:09.280 | But I said, "I just really like aptitude does not equal access." These people didn't have access,

00:13:15.520 | but they had aptitude. It changed my whole view to skills first. And so now for hiring,

00:13:22.080 | that's kind of a long story to tell you, the number one thing I would hire for now

00:13:25.760 | is somebody's willingness to learn. And you can test, you can try different ways,

00:13:29.680 | but their curiosity and willingness to learn, hands down, I will take that trait over anything

00:13:34.640 | else they have.

00:13:35.440 | So the interview process, the questions you ask-

00:13:37.200 | Changed. Everything changed.

00:13:38.560 | The kind of things you talk to them about is try to get at how curious they are about the work.

00:13:43.360 | And testing. I mean, we triangulated around it lots of ways. And now look,

00:13:47.200 | at the heart of it, what it would do is change. You don't think of buying skills,

00:13:52.080 | you think of building skills. And when you think that way, with so many people, and I think

00:13:57.760 | this country, many developed countries being disenfranchised, you got to bring them back

00:14:02.960 | into the workforce somehow, and they got to get some kind of contemporary skills.

00:14:06.160 | And if you took that approach, you can bring them back into the workforce.

00:14:10.480 | Yeah, I think some interesting combination of humility and passion. Because like you said,

00:14:15.120 | experts sometimes lack humility if they call themselves an expert for a few too many years.

00:14:22.240 | So you have to have that beginner's mind and a passion to be able to aggressively, constantly

00:14:27.600 | be a beginner at everything and learn and learn and learn.

00:14:30.320 | You know, I saw it firsthand when we were beginning this path down the cloud in AI,

00:14:35.760 | and people would say, "Oh, IBM, you know, it's existential. They've got to change." And

00:14:41.840 | all these things. And I did hire a lot of people from outside, very willing to learn new things.

00:14:46.560 | "Come on in. Come on in." And I sometimes say, "Shiny objects. Trained in shiny objects. Come

00:14:51.760 | on in." But I saw something, it was another one of these, "You're not a shiny object. I'm not

00:14:56.160 | saying that." But I learned something. Okay, some of them did fantastic. And others, they're like,

00:15:04.640 | "Well, let me school you on everything." But they didn't realize we did really mission-critical

00:15:09.200 | work. And that'd break a bank. I mean, they would not understand the certain kind of security and

00:15:13.520 | the auditability and everything they had to go on. And then I watched IBM people say, "Oh,

00:15:19.200 | I actually could learn something." Some were like, "Yeah. Okay. I don't know how to do that. That's

00:15:22.480 | a really good thing I could learn." And in the end, there was not like one group was a winner

00:15:26.800 | and one was a loser. The winners were the people who were willing to learn from each other.

00:15:30.240 | I mean, to me, it was very stark example of that point. And I saw it firsthand. So,

00:15:36.560 | that's why I'm so committed to this idea about skills first. And that's how people should be

00:15:40.240 | hired, promoted, paid, you name it. - Yeah. The AI in general, it seems like

00:15:47.360 | nobody really understands now what the future will look like. We're all trying to figure it out. So,

00:15:52.960 | what IBM will look like in 50 years in relation to the software business to AI is unknown. What

00:15:59.680 | Google will look like, what all these companies, we're trying to figure it out. And that means

00:16:04.240 | constantly learning, taking risks, all of those things. And nobody's really skilled in AI.

00:16:11.440 | - You're absolutely right. That's right. I couldn't agree more with you on that.

00:16:16.400 | - You wrote in the book, speaking of hiring, "My drive for perfection often meant I only

00:16:25.200 | focused on what needed to change without acknowledging the positive. This could keep

00:16:29.600 | people from trusting themselves. It could take me a while to learn that just because I could point

00:16:34.800 | something out didn't mean I should. I still spotted errors, but I became more deliberate

00:16:39.840 | about what I mentioned and sent back to get fixed. I also tried to curtail my tendency to micromanage

00:16:45.680 | and let people execute. I had to stop assuming my way was the best or only way. I was learning

00:16:51.920 | that giving other people control builds their confidence and that constantly trying to control

00:16:56.720 | people destroys it." So, what's the right balance between showing the way and helping people find

00:17:04.560 | the way? - That is a good question. Because, like a really flip answer would be, as it gets bigger,

00:17:13.440 | you have no choice but to just, you know, you can't do it. You have to tell or show. I mean,

00:17:20.960 | you've got to let people find their way because it's so big you can't, right? That's an obvious

00:17:26.160 | answer. Scope of work. Bigger it gets, okay, I've got to let more stuff go. But, I have always

00:17:34.160 | believed that a leader's job is to do as well. And I think there's like a few areas that are

00:17:43.760 | really important that you always do. Now, it doesn't mean you're showing. So, like when it has

00:17:49.360 | to do with values and value-based decisions, like I think it's really important to constantly

00:17:54.800 | show people that you walk your talk on that kind of thing. It's super important. And I actually

00:18:02.800 | think it's a struggle young companies have because the values aren't deeply rooted. And when a storm

00:18:08.080 | comes, it's easy to uproot. And so, I always felt like when it was that time, I showed it. I got

00:18:15.520 | taught that so young at IBM and even General Motors. In fact, I do write about that in the book.

00:18:23.120 | First time I was a manager, I had a gentleman telling dirty jokes. And not to me, but to other

00:18:30.480 | people. And it really offended people and some of the women. And this is the very early '80s.

00:18:38.480 | And they came, said something. I talked to my boss. I'm a first-time manager. And he was

00:18:45.600 | unequivocal with what I should do. He said, and this was a top performer, "It stops immediately

00:18:50.880 | or you fire him." So, there are a few areas like that that I actually think you have to always

00:18:56.400 | continue to role model and show. That to me isn't the kind that like when do you let go of stuff.

00:19:02.480 | The values and relationships with clients.

00:19:06.400 | Yeah, whatever you're in service of. And the other thing was, I really felt it was really

00:19:10.960 | important to role model learning. So, I can remember when we started down the journey

00:19:17.440 | and we went on to this thing called the Think Academy. IBM's longtime motto had been Think.

00:19:22.960 | And we said, "Okay, I'm going to make the first Friday of every month compulsory education."

00:19:27.440 | And, okay, I mean everybody. Like everybody, I don't care what your job is. When the whole

00:19:33.200 | company has to transform, everybody's got to kind of have some skin in this game and understand it.

00:19:37.280 | I taught the first hour of every month for four years. Now, okay, I had to learn something.

00:19:43.600 | But it made me learn. But I was like, "Okay, if I can teach this, you can do it." Right? I mean,

00:19:49.040 | you know, that kind of thing.

00:19:50.080 | So, it was a compulsory Thursday night education for you.

00:19:53.120 | I'm a little bit better prepared than that. But yes, you're so right. Yes.

00:19:57.200 | So, you prepare.

00:19:58.080 | Yeah.

00:19:58.880 | So, like personality-wise, you like to prepare?

00:20:01.840 | Yeah. But there's roots in that go back deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply. And I think

00:20:06.240 | it's an interesting reason. So, why do? You're prepared, my friend. Yes, you are. You prepare

00:20:11.760 | for your interviews.

00:20:12.480 | Uh, sure.

00:20:15.040 | The rest you wing?

00:20:16.080 | Yeah, I wing most of it.

00:20:16.800 | But that's okay. I mean, you don't have to prepare everything. I don't prepare everything

00:20:19.920 | either.

00:20:20.400 | No, but I unfortunately wing stuff. I save it to last minute. I push everything. I'm always

00:20:25.680 | almost late. And I don't know why that is. I mean, there's some deep psychological thing we

00:20:30.160 | should probably investigate. But it's probably the anxiety brings out the performance.

00:20:34.720 | That can be. That's very true with some people.

00:20:36.400 | I mean, so, I'm a programmer and engineer at heart. And so, programmers famously overestimate

00:20:41.840 | or underestimate, sorry, how long something's going to take. And so, I just, everything,

00:20:47.520 | always underestimate. And it's almost as if I want to feel this chaos of anxiety of a

00:20:54.240 | deadline or something like this. Otherwise, I'll be lazy sitting on a beach with a pina

00:20:57.840 | colada and relaxing.

00:20:58.960 | Yeah.

00:20:59.280 | I don't know. So, we have to know ourselves. But for you, you like to prepare.

00:21:03.600 | For me. Yeah. It came from a few different places. I mean, one would have been as a kid,

00:21:08.640 | I think, I was not a memorizer. And my brother is brilliant. He can read it once, boom, done.

00:21:17.440 | And so, I always wanted to understand how something happened. It didn't matter what

00:21:21.040 | it was I was doing. Whether it was algebra, theorems, I always wanted, don't give me the

00:21:24.960 | answer. Don't give me the answer. I want to figure it out, figure it out. So, I could

00:21:27.440 | reproduce it again and didn't have to memorize. So, it started with that. And then over time,

00:21:32.720 | okay, so I was in university in the 70s. When I was in engineering school, I was the only woman.

00:21:39.360 | You know, I meet people still to this day and they're like, "Oh, I remember you." I'm like,

00:21:42.080 | "Yeah, sorry, I don't remember you. There were 30 of you, one of me." And I think you already

00:21:47.360 | get that feeling of, okay, I better really study hard because whatever I say is going to be

00:21:50.640 | remembered in this class, good or bad. And it started there. So, in some ways, I did it for

00:21:58.160 | two reasons. Early on, I think it was a shield for confidence. The more I studied, the more prepared

00:22:04.720 | I was, the more confident. That's probably still true to this day. The second reason I did it

00:22:10.480 | evolved over time and became different to prepare. If I was really prepared, then when we're in the

00:22:17.040 | moment, I can really listen to you. See, because I don't have to be doing all this stuff on the fly

00:22:21.920 | in my head. And I could actually take things I know and maybe help the situation. So, it really

00:22:27.920 | became a way that I could be present in the moment. And I think it's something a lot of people

00:22:34.720 | that in the moment, I learned it from my husband. He doesn't prepare by the way at all. So, that's

00:22:38.800 | not it. But I watched the in the moment part. The negative example.

00:22:43.040 | No, no, no. And I'm not going to change that. As he says, he's a type C, I'm an A.

00:22:46.800 | Yes, of course. That's how love works.

00:22:47.840 | And I have been married 43 years and that seems to work. But that idea that you could be in the

00:22:53.440 | moment with people is a really important thing. Yeah. So, the preparation gives you the freedom

00:22:58.560 | to really be present. So, just to linger on, you mentioned your brother. And it seems like in the

00:23:06.000 | book that you really had to work hard when you studied to sort of, given that you weren't good

00:23:13.360 | at memorization, you really truly deeply wanted to understand the stuff and you put in the hard

00:23:17.200 | work. And that seems to persist throughout your career. So, hard work is often associated with,

00:23:23.120 | sort of has negative associations. Well, maybe with burnout, with dissatisfaction.

00:23:29.200 | Is there some aspect of hard work at the core of who you are that led to happiness for you?

00:23:36.560 | Did you enjoy it?

00:23:38.000 | I enjoyed it. So, I'll be the first. And I'm really careful to say that to people because

00:23:43.600 | I don't think everyone should associate, "Gee, to do what you did, there's only one route there."

00:23:48.560 | Right? And that's just not true. And I do it because I like it. In fact, I'm careful. And

00:23:53.840 | as time goes on, you have to be careful as more and more people watch you. Whether you like it,

00:23:57.760 | you're a role model or not. You are a role model for people. Whether you know it, like it, want it,

00:24:01.440 | does not matter. I learned that the hard way. And I would have to say to people, "Hey, just because

00:24:05.200 | I do this does not mean I do it for these reasons." Right? So, be really explicit. And I'd come to

00:24:11.360 | believe, usually when people say the word power, I don't know, do you have a positive or negative

00:24:14.960 | notion when I say the word power? We'll just do a- - Probably negative one, yeah.

00:24:18.080 | - For some stereotype or some view that somebody's abused it in some way. You can read the newspaper,

00:24:23.840 | somebody's doing something. Personal people, like I'll ask people, "Do you want power?" And they're

00:24:29.040 | like, "Oh no, I'd rather do good." And I think the irony is you need power to do good.

00:24:35.280 | And so, that sort of led me down to, as I thought about my own life, right? Because it starts in a,

00:24:42.640 | like many of us, you don't have a lot, but you don't know that because you're like everybody

00:24:48.720 | else around you at that time. And on one end, tragedy, right? My father leaves my mother,

00:24:54.240 | homeless, no money, no food, nothing, four kids. She's never worked a day in her life outside of

00:25:00.080 | a home. And the irony that I hear I would end up as the ninth CEO of one of America's iconic

00:25:06.080 | companies. And now I co-chair this group 110. And that journey, I said, "The biggest thing I learned

00:25:11.680 | was you could do really hard, meaningful things in a positive way." So now you ask me about why

00:25:15.920 | do I work so hard? I ended up writing the book in three pieces for this reason. When you really

00:25:22.720 | think of your life and power, I thought it kind of fell like a pebble in water. Like there's a

00:25:28.880 | ring about you really care about yourself and like the power of yourself, power of me. There's a time

00:25:35.360 | it transcends to that you are working with and for others and another moment when it becomes like

00:25:39.680 | about society. So my hard work, I'd ask you, one day sit really hard and think about when you close

00:25:46.880 | your eyes, who do you see from your early life, right? And what did you learn? And maybe it's not

00:25:52.080 | that hard for you. I mean, it's funny the things then, if I really looked at it, it's no surprise

00:25:59.680 | what I do today. And that hard work part, my great-grandma, as you and I were comparing notes

00:26:05.280 | on Russia, right? And never spoke English, spoke Russian, came here to this country, was a cleaning

00:26:11.520 | person at the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Yet if she hadn't saved every dime she made,

00:26:17.120 | my mother wouldn't have a home and wouldn't have had a car, right? What did I learn from that?

00:26:22.000 | Hard work. In fact, actually, when I went to college, she's like, "You know, you really should

00:26:25.440 | be on a farm. You're so big and strong." That was her view. And then my grandmother,

00:26:31.520 | another tragic life. What did she do though? And think how long, that's in the 40s, the 50s,

00:26:37.680 | she made lampshades. And she taught me how to sew, right? So I could sew clothes when we couldn't

00:26:43.200 | afford them. But my memory of my grandma is working seven days a week, sewing lampshades.

00:26:51.360 | And then here comes my mom and her situation who climbs her way out of it. So I associate that

00:26:57.680 | with, well, strong women, by the way, all strong women. And I associate hard work with how you are

00:27:07.040 | sure you can always take care of yourself. And so I think that the roots go way back there.

00:27:11.840 | And they were always teaching something, right? My great-grandma was teaching me how to cook,

00:27:15.040 | how to work a farm, even though I didn't need to be on a farm. My grandma taught me, you know,

00:27:19.440 | here's how to sew, here's how to run a business. And then my mother would teach us that,

00:27:23.600 | "Look, with just a little bit of education, look at the difference it could make." Right?

00:27:27.040 | So anyways, that's a long answer too. I think that hard work thing is really

00:27:31.760 | deeply rooted from that background. - And it gives you a way out from hard times.

00:27:36.000 | - Yeah. You know, I think I've seen you on other podcasts say,

00:27:39.520 | "I thought I did. Do you want a plan B?" Didn't you say, "No, you would not like a plan B?"

00:27:46.240 | - Yeah, I don't want a plan B. - Because you're like,

00:27:47.760 | "I would prefer my backup against, am I remembering?" - You have a story like that.

00:27:50.960 | You seem to have, at least certain moments in your life, seem to do well in desperate times.

00:27:59.520 | - True enough. True enough, that's true. I learned that very well. But I also think that maybe this

00:28:07.440 | isn't the same kind of plan B. I think of it as, like I was taught, always be able to take care of

00:28:12.400 | yourself. Don't have to rely on someone else. And I think that to me, so that's my plan B,

00:28:18.960 | I can take care of myself. And it's even after what I lived through with my father, I thought,

00:28:24.240 | "Well, this is at a bar for bad. After this, nothing's bad." And that is a very freeing thought.

00:28:30.400 | - The being able to take care of yourself, is that, you mean practically, or do you mean just

00:28:35.280 | a self-belief that I'll figure it out? - I'll figure it out and practically both,

00:28:39.040 | right? - So you wrote,

00:28:40.720 | "I vividly remember the last two weeks of my freshman year when I only had 25 cents left.

00:28:48.160 | I put the quarter in a clear plastic box on my desk and just stared at it. This is it, I thought,

00:28:54.640 | no more money." So do you think there's some aspect of that financial stress, even desperation,

00:29:02.560 | just being hungry, does that play a role in that drive that led to your success to be the CEO

00:29:09.840 | of one of the great companies ever? - It's a really interesting question

00:29:12.800 | because I was just talking to another colleague who's CEO of another great American company this

00:29:17.520 | weekend. And he mentioned to me about all this adversity and he said, or I said to him, I said,

00:29:24.160 | "Do you think part of your success is 'cause you had bad stuff happen?"

00:29:30.400 | And he said, "Yes." And so I guess I'd be lying if I didn't say, I don't think you have to have

00:29:38.400 | tragedy, but it does teach you one really important thing is that there is always a way forward,

00:29:43.840 | always, and it's in your control. - And I think there's probably wisdom

00:29:47.440 | for mentorship there, or whether you're a parent or a mentor, that easy times don't result in growth.

00:29:55.120 | - Yeah, I've heard a lot of my friends and they worry, they say, "Gee, my kids have never had

00:29:59.040 | bad times." And so what happens here? So I don't know, is it required? And why you end up,

00:30:06.320 | not required, but it sure doesn't hurt. - You had this good line about advice you

00:30:11.760 | were given that growth and comfort never coexist, growth and comfort never coexist.

00:30:17.280 | And you have to get used to that thought. - If someone said that they think of me like

00:30:21.040 | one of the more profound sort of lessons I had, and the irony is, it's from my husband,

00:30:28.240 | which is even more funny, actually. - I'm glad you're able to, you could just steal it.

00:30:32.000 | I mean, you don't have to give him credit. - Oh, I have, I have, shamelessly, as he'll tell you.

00:30:35.200 | Okay, so the story behind growth and comfort never coexist, but honestly, I think it's been

00:30:42.240 | a really freeing thought for me, and it's helped me immensely since. Mid-career, and as I write

00:30:49.680 | about it in the book, I'm mid-career, and I'd been running a pretty big business, actually,

00:30:55.520 | and the fella I work for is gonna get a new job, he's gonna get promoted. He calls me and he says,

00:30:58.880 | "Hey, you're gonna get my job. I really want you to have it." And I said to him, "No way." I said,

00:31:04.400 | "I'm not ready for that job. I got a lot more things I gotta learn. That is like a huge job,

00:31:09.200 | round the world, every product line, development, you name it, every function, I can't do it."

00:31:14.160 | He looked at me, he says, "Well, I think you should go to the interview." I went to the interview the

00:31:20.640 | next day, blah, blah, blah. Guy says to me, looks at me and he says, "I wanna offer you that job."

00:31:25.680 | And I said, "I would like to think about it." I said, "I wanna go home and talk to my husband

00:31:31.840 | about it." He kinda looked at me, "Okay." I went home, my husband is sitting there and he says to

00:31:38.560 | me, I went on and on about the story, et cetera, and he says, "Do you think a man would've answered

00:31:44.640 | it that way?" And I said, "Hmm." He says, "I know you." He's like, "Six months, you're gonna be

00:31:51.360 | bored. And all you can think of is what you don't know." And he said, "And I know these other

00:31:56.160 | people. You have way more skill than them and they think they could do it." And he's like, "Why?"

00:32:01.920 | And for me, it internalized this feeling that, and I am gonna say something that's a bit stereotyped,

00:32:10.000 | that it resonates with many, many women, and I'll ask you if it does after, is that they're the most

00:32:15.600 | harsh critic of themselves. And so this idea that I won't grow unless I can feel uncomfortable,

00:32:21.840 | doesn't mean I always have to show it, by the way. So that's why I meant growth and comfort can never

00:32:26.000 | coexist. So I was like, "He's exactly right." Now, the end of that story is I went in and I took the

00:32:32.320 | job. When I went back to the man who was really my mentor looking out for me, and he looked at me and

00:32:37.760 | he said, "Don't ever do that again." And I said, "I understand." Because it was okay to be

00:32:43.360 | uncomfortable. I didn't have to use it. I mean, now I would take stock of the things I can do,

00:32:48.960 | right? And really think, or I look for times to be uncomfortable. Because I know if I am nervous,

00:32:55.360 | like, I don't know if you're nervous to meet me. We never met in real person.

00:32:58.960 | - 100%. I'm still terrified.

00:33:00.720 | - No, you're not. But then you're, it means you're learning something, right?

00:33:04.160 | - Holding it together.

00:33:04.880 | - So that to me matters.

00:33:07.520 | - I think it's interesting. Maybe you could speak to that, the sort of the self-critical

00:33:12.560 | thing inside your brain. Because I think sometimes it's talked about that women have that.

00:33:21.040 | But I have that, definitely. And I think that's not just solely a property of women in the workplace.

00:33:28.480 | - No, I don't think it is either.

00:33:28.800 | - But I also want to sort of push back on the idea that that's a bad thing that you should

00:33:33.360 | silence. Because I think that anxiety, that leads to growth also. That's like this discomfort. So

00:33:39.760 | there's this weird balance you have to have between that self-critical engine and confidence.

00:33:44.080 | - Yeah, I think that's a good point.

00:33:45.440 | - You have to kind of dance. Because if you're super confident, people will value you higher.

00:33:49.200 | That's important. But if you're way too confident, maybe in the short term you'll gain,

00:33:53.120 | but in the long term you won't grow.

00:33:54.400 | - Very good point. So I can't really disagree with that. And to me, even when I took on jobs,

00:34:00.160 | I always felt people say, "Well, what point are you confident enough?" And I came to sort of

00:34:05.200 | believe, again, a theme of my beliefs that if I was willing to ask lots of questions and understood

00:34:10.640 | enough, that's all I needed to know. - Let me ask you about your husband

00:34:15.760 | a little bit. - Oh.

00:34:16.800 | - So you write in the book. You write in the book. He's just jumping around. Like I said,

00:34:21.440 | I'm a bit of a romantic. So how did you meet your husband?

00:34:23.920 | - 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

00:34:32.160 | General Motors scholarship. So I was at Northwestern University through my first two years,

00:34:37.600 | had a lot of loans, financial aid. And a professor said, "Hey, you should sign up for this

00:34:43.440 | interview. They're looking to bring forward diverse candidates through their management track.

00:34:47.920 | Now, these programs don't exist anymore like that. They will pay your tuition,

00:34:51.360 | your room and board, your expenses at Northwestern, other Ivy League schools,

00:34:55.520 | these very expensive schools. And I think you'd be a good fit." I am eternally thankful for that

00:35:01.680 | advice. I went and I interviewed. I actually got the scholarship. I mean, without it, I'd have

00:35:06.080 | graduated with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. So part of that was in the summer,

00:35:11.600 | I had to work in Detroit. I lived a little room by a cement plant. Not theirs, but I mean,

00:35:16.720 | that's all I could afford. - Very romantic.

00:35:18.320 | - Very, very romantic. And the person who owned the house said, "Hey, I'm having a party. You're

00:35:22.960 | not invited. I'm going to fix you up with someone tonight." And that turned out to be my husband.

00:35:28.480 | And so it was a blind date is how we very first met.

00:35:31.680 | - And then it was over. The story was written. - Yep.

00:35:35.200 | - If it's okay, just zoom out to, you mentioned power and good power a few times. So if we can

00:35:42.240 | just even talk about it. Your book is called "Good Power, Leading Positive Change in Our Lives,

00:35:46.880 | Work, and World." What is good power? What's the essence of good power?

00:35:50.640 | - Yeah. So the essence of it would be doing something hard or meaningful, but in a positive

00:35:57.520 | way. I would also tell you, I hope one day I'm remembered for how I did things, not just for

00:36:05.920 | what I did. I think that could almost be more important. And I think it's a choice we can all

00:36:09.600 | make. So the essence to me of good power, if I had a contrast, good to bad, let's say, would be that

00:36:15.360 | first off, you have to embrace and navigate tension. This is the world we live in. And

00:36:22.640 | by embracing tension, not running from it, you would bridge divides that unites people,

00:36:28.720 | not divides them. It's a hard thing to do, but you can do it. You do it with respect,

00:36:33.280 | which is the opposite of fear. A lot of people think the way to get things done is fear.

00:36:37.440 | And then the third thing would be, you got to celebrate some progress versus perfection.

00:36:44.000 | Because I also think that's what stops a lot of things from happening. Because if you go for

00:36:48.320 | whatever your definition of perfect is, it's either polarization or paralyzation. I mean,

00:36:54.480 | something happens in there versus no, no, no. Don't worry about getting to that actual exact

00:37:01.040 | endpoint. If I keep taking a step forward of progress, really tough stuff can get done.

00:37:06.160 | And so my view of that is like, honestly, I hope it can, I said it's like a memoir with purpose.

00:37:12.320 | I'm only doing it. It was a really hard thing for me to do because I don't actually talk about all

00:37:17.360 | these things. And I had to, nobody cares about your like scientific description of this. They

00:37:22.000 | want the stories in your life to bring it alive. So it's a memoir with purpose. And in the writing

00:37:27.200 | of it, it became the power of me, the power of we, and the power of us. The idea that you build a

00:37:33.120 | foundation when you're young, mostly from my work life, the power of we, which says, I kind of,

00:37:40.560 | in retrospect, could see five principles on how to really drive change that would be done in a

00:37:47.200 | good way. And then eventually you could scale that, the power really of us, which is what I'm

00:37:52.880 | doing about finding better jobs for more people now that I co-chair an organization called 110.

00:37:58.320 | So that essence of navigate tensions, do it respectfully, celebrate progress,

00:38:06.800 | and indulge me one more minute, these sort of, again, it's retrospect that I didn't know this

00:38:14.160 | in the moment. I had to learn it. I learned it. I am blessed by a lot of people I worked with and

00:38:18.480 | around. But some of the principles, like the first one says, if you're going to do something,

00:38:27.280 | change something, do something, you got to be in service of something. Being in service of

00:38:34.000 | is really different than serving, super different. And like, I just had my knee replaced

00:38:39.680 | and I interviewed all these doctors. You can tell the difference that the guy who's going to do a

00:38:44.800 | surgery, hey, my surgery is fine. I really don't care whether you can walk and do the stuff you

00:38:47.680 | wanted to do again, but because my surgery is fine. Your hardware is good. I actually had some

00:38:52.240 | trouble. And I had a doctor who was like, you know, this doesn't sound right. I'm coming to you.

00:38:56.720 | The surgery was fine. It was me that was reacting wrong to it. And he didn't care until I could

00:39:03.120 | walk again. Okay. There's a big difference in those two things. And it's true in any business

00:39:07.680 | you have. A waiter serves your food. Okay. He serves his food. He did his job. Or did he care

00:39:13.360 | he had a good time? So that thought to be in service of, it took me a while to get that,

00:39:18.000 | like to try to write it, to get that across. Cause I think it's like so fundamental.

00:39:21.680 | If people were really in service of something, you got to believe that if I fulfill your needs

00:39:28.800 | at the end of the day, mine will be fulfilled. And that is that essence that makes it so different.

00:39:35.280 | And then the second part, second principle is about building belief, which is I got to hope

00:39:40.320 | you'll voluntarily believe in a new future or some alternate reality. And you will use your

00:39:45.200 | discretionary energy versus me ordering you. You'll get so much more done. Then the third

00:39:50.880 | change and endure. We kind of talked about that earlier, focus more on the how and the skills.

00:39:56.800 | And then the part on good tech and being resilient. So anyways, I just felt that

00:40:03.360 | like good tech, everybody's a tech company. I don't care what you do today.

00:40:06.880 | And there's some fundamental things you got to do. In fact, pick up today's, any newspaper, right?

00:40:12.400 | Chat GPT. You're an AI guy. All right. I believe one of the tenants of good tech is,

00:40:18.720 | it's like responsibility for the longterm. It says, so if you're going to invent something,

00:40:23.280 | you better look at its upside and its downside. Like we did quantum computing.

00:40:27.120 | Great. A lot of great stuff, right? Materials development, risk management calculations,

00:40:33.120 | endless lists one day. On the other side, it can break encryption. That's a bad thing.

00:40:38.080 | So we work equally hard on all the algorithms that would sustain quantum. I think with chat,

00:40:44.960 | okay, great. There's equal in, there are people working on it, but like, okay,

00:40:50.880 | the things that say, hey, I can tell this was written with that, right? Because the implications

00:40:56.320 | on how people learn, right? If this is not a great thing, if all it does is do your homework,

00:41:00.160 | that is not the idea of homework as someone who liked to study so hard. But anyways, you get my

00:41:05.200 | point. It's just the upside and the downside. And that there could be a much larger implications

00:41:08.800 | that are much more difficult to predict. And it's our responsibility to really work hard to figure

00:41:14.560 | that out. I was talking to AI ethics a decade ago, and I'm like, why won't anybody listen to us?

00:41:20.480 | That's another one of those values things that you realize, hey, if I'm going to bring technology in

00:41:24.480 | the world, I better bring it safely. And that to me comes with when you're an older company that's

00:41:30.320 | been around, you realize that society gave you a license to operate and it can take it away.

00:41:34.880 | And we see that happen to companies. And therefore you're like, okay, like why I feel so strong about

00:41:41.200 | skills. Hey, if I'm going to bring in, it's going to create all these new jobs, job dislocation,

00:41:45.920 | then I should help on trying to help people get new skills. Anyways, that's a long answer to what

00:41:50.560 | good tech, but the idea that there's kind of in retrospect, a set of principles you could look at

00:41:57.040 | and maybe learn something from my sort of rocky road through there.

00:42:01.040 | But it started with the power of we, and there's that big leap, I think that propagates through

00:42:06.960 | the things you're saying, which is the leap from focusing on yourself to the focusing on others. So

00:42:11.360 | that having that empathy, you've said at some point in our lives and careers, our attention

00:42:16.720 | turns from ourselves to others. We still have our own goals, but we recognize that our actions

00:42:22.000 | affect many, that it is impossible to achieve anything truly meaningful alone. So it's to you,

00:42:28.640 | I think maybe you can correct me, but ultimate good power is about collaboration. And maybe

00:42:38.080 | in large companies, like delegation on great teams.

00:42:42.240 | The ultimate good power is actually doing something for society. That would be my

00:42:45.520 | ultimate definition of good power, by the way.

00:42:46.480 | So it's about the results of the thing.

00:42:48.080 | Yeah, but how it's done, right? The how it's done. And so, you know, when you said a leap,

00:42:56.800 | do you think people make a leap when they go from thinking about themselves to others?

00:43:00.480 | Do you think it's a leap or do you think it kind of just is a sort of slow point?

00:43:04.560 | I think the leap is in deciding that this is, it's like deciding that you will care about others.

00:43:13.040 | That this is, it's like a leap of going to the gym for the first time. Yes, it takes a long time

00:43:17.840 | to develop that and to actually care, but that decision that I'm going to actually care about

00:43:22.000 | other human beings. Yeah. I think, or at least, like, yeah, it just feels like a deliberate action

00:43:28.160 | you take of empathy.

00:43:29.280 | Yeah, because sometimes I think it happens a little, it's maybe not as deliberate. Yeah,

00:43:32.720 | it's a little bit more gradual because it might happen because you realize that, geez,

00:43:36.320 | I can't get this done alone. So I got to have other people with me. Well, how do I get them

00:43:40.240 | to help me do something? So I think it does help happen a little bit more gradually. And as you

00:43:45.680 | get more confident, you start to not think so much that it's about you. And you start to think

00:43:50.400 | about this other thing you're trying to accomplish. And so that's why I felt it was a little more

00:43:55.680 | gradual. I also felt like I can remember so well, you know, this idea that, again, now we're in the

00:44:04.960 | 80s, 90s, I'm a woman, I'm in technology. And I was down in Australia at a conference.

00:44:11.920 | And I gave this great speech, again, me, power of me, you know, I'm thinking I give this great

00:44:17.280 | speech, financial services, this guy, man walks up to me after I think he's going to like ask me

00:44:21.200 | some great question. And he said to me, I wish my daughter could have been here. And in that moment,

00:44:27.600 | and I in at that point, up to then, I'd always been about, look, please don't notice I'm a

00:44:33.200 | woman, do not notice that I am, I just want to be recognized for my work. Crossing over from me to

00:44:39.440 | we, like it or not, I was a role model for some number of people. And maybe I didn't want to be,

00:44:46.320 | but that didn't really matter. So I could either accept that and embrace it or not. I think it's

00:44:51.120 | a good example of that transition. I did have a little epiphany with that happening. And then I'm

00:44:55.840 | like, okay, because I would always be like, no, I won't go on a women's conference. I won't talk

00:44:59.680 | here. I won't, you know, no, no, no. But then I sort of realized, wait a second, you know,

00:45:04.560 | that old saying, you cannot be what you cannot see. And I said to myself, well, oh, wait a second.

00:45:11.280 | Okay. I am in these positions I have a responsibility to, and it's to others. And

00:45:17.440 | that's what I meant. I felt like it can be somewhat gradual that you come and you may

00:45:20.720 | have these like pivotal moments that you see it, but then you feel it and you sort of move over

00:45:25.840 | that transom into the power of we. - You're one of the most powerful tech leaders ever.

00:45:31.760 | And as you mentioned the word power, you know, the old saying goes, power corrupts and absolute

00:45:37.120 | power corrupts. Absolutely. Was there an aspect of power that was, that you had to resist

00:45:48.000 | its ability to corrupt your mind to sort of delude you into thinking you're smarter than you are,

00:45:55.040 | that kind of, all the ways. - That's very dangerous. I agree with, I mean,

00:45:58.320 | I think you got to be careful who you surround yourself with. That's how I would answer that

00:46:02.240 | question. Right. And people who will hold the mirror up to you can be done in a very positive

00:46:06.240 | way, by the way, it doesn't mean, you know, but that we're sycophants, you cannot have that.

00:46:11.120 | Right. I mean, it's like, I always say to someone like, hey, listen to me, tell me,

00:46:15.040 | I mean, tell me what would make me better or do something. Or I have a husband that'll do that for

00:46:19.360 | me quite easily, by the way. He'll always tell me. - He's the one that kind of gives you some

00:46:23.600 | criticism sometimes. - I have been surrounded myself with a number of people that will do that.

00:46:26.880 | And I think you have to have that. I had a woman that worked with me for a very long time. And

00:46:32.160 | at one time we were competitors. And then at some point she started to work for me and stayed with

00:46:36.880 | me for quite a while. And she was one of the few people that would tell me the truth in, you know,

00:46:40.800 | sometimes I'm like, enough already. And she'd be like, do not roll your eyes at this. And you

00:46:46.960 | absolutely have got to have that. And I think it also comes, it'll go back to my complete

00:46:51.600 | commitment to inclusion and diversity, 'cause you gotta have that variety around you. You'll get a

00:46:56.400 | better product and a better answer at the end of the day. And so that, to resist that allure,

00:47:01.920 | I think it's around about who you surround yourself with. I, current politics would say that too.

00:47:06.240 | - So you, you write about, and in general you value diversity a lot. So

00:47:10.720 | can you speak to almost like philosophically, what does diversity mean to you?

00:47:14.800 | - Diversity to me means I'm gonna get a better product, a better answer. I value different views.

00:47:22.960 | And so it's inclusion. So I always say inclusion, diversity is a number, inclusion is a choice.

00:47:29.280 | And you can make that choice every single day. - That's a good line.

00:47:33.920 | - I really believe, and I've witnessed it, that I've had, when my teams are diverse,

00:47:39.120 | I get a better answer. My friends are diverse, I have a better life. I mean, all these kinds of

00:47:43.760 | things. And so I also believe it's like no silver thread, there's no easy way. You have to

00:47:49.600 | authentically believe it. I mean, do you authentically believe that diversity is a good thing?

00:47:54.320 | - Yeah, but I believe that diversity, like broadly-- - A thought, I very broadly define it.

00:47:59.840 | - Yeah, so like there's, sometimes the way diversity is looked at, the way diversity is

00:48:05.520 | used today is like surface level characteristics, which are also important, but they're usually

00:48:10.160 | reflective of something else, which is a diversity of background, a diversity of thought, a diversity

00:48:14.960 | of struggle. Some people that grew up middle-class versus poor, different countries, different

00:48:22.240 | motivations, all of that. Yeah, it's beautiful when different people from very different walks

00:48:26.880 | of life get together. Yeah, it's beautiful to see. But sometimes it's very difficult to get

00:48:31.440 | at that on a sheet of paper of the characteristics that defines the diversity.

00:48:37.040 | - I know, so it is. It's just like, oh, I can't hire exactly for, or if I'm trying to,

00:48:41.040 | but I do know one thing, that when people say, well, I can't find these kind of people I'm

00:48:46.560 | looking for, I'm like, you're just not looking in the right places.

00:48:48.400 | - Right, you have to open up-- - You gotta really open up new pools.

00:48:50.800 | - Yeah, you have to think, like everybody, you don't have to have a PhD, just like you said.

00:48:55.360 | - I'm sorry to say it. I know it's very valuable what you have, trust me, but--

00:48:59.280 | - Well, just like you said, it could even be a negative. So you mentioned,

00:49:04.000 | like for good power, you are a CEO, you were a CEO for a long time of a public company.

00:49:10.480 | Were there times when there was pressure to sacrifice what is good for the world

00:49:16.240 | for the bottom line in order to do what's good for the company?

00:49:20.960 | - There were a lot of times for that. I mean, I think every company faces that today in that

00:49:25.680 | I always felt like there's so much discussion about stakeholder capitalism, right? Do you just

00:49:31.040 | serve a shareholder or do you have multiple? I have always found, and I've been very vocal about

00:49:36.000 | that topic, that when I participated, the Business Roundtable wrote up a new purpose statement that

00:49:40.960 | had multiple stakeholders. I think it's common sense. Like if you're gonna be 100 years old,

00:49:45.920 | you only get there because you actually do at some time balance all these different stakeholders

00:49:50.800 | in what it is that you do, and short-term, long-term, all these trade-offs. And I always say

00:49:55.520 | people who write about it, they write about it black and white, but I have to live in a gray

00:49:59.360 | world. Nothing I've ever done has been in a black and white world, hardly. Maybe things of values

00:50:04.080 | that I had to answer, but most of it is gray. And so I think back lots of different decisions.

00:50:10.480 | I think back, as you would well remember, you're a student of history. IBM was one of the really the

00:50:17.120 | originators of the semiconductor industry, and certainly of commercializing the semiconductor

00:50:21.440 | industry. Great R&D and manufacturing, but it is a game of volume. And so when I came on,

00:50:28.640 | we were still manufacturing R&D and manufacturing our own chips. We were losing a lot of money,

00:50:35.440 | yet here we had to fight a war on cloud and AI. And so, okay, now shareholders would say,

00:50:41.200 | "Fine, shut it down." Okay, those chips also power some of the most important systems that power

00:50:46.320 | these, the banks of today. If I just shut it down, well, what would that do? And so, okay,

00:50:52.480 | the answer wasn't just stop it. The answer wasn't just keep putting money into it. The answer was,

00:50:58.400 | and we had to kind of sit in an uncomfortable spot till we found a way. I mean, it's going to sound

00:51:02.720 | so basic, but you as an engineer understand it. We had to separate. It was a very integrated process

00:51:09.680 | of research, development, and manufacturing. And you'd also, you'd be perfecting things in

00:51:13.440 | manufacturing. And these were very high performance chips. We had to be able to separate those. We

00:51:19.280 | eventually found a way to do that so that we could take the manufacturing elsewhere and we would

00:51:24.960 | maintain the R&D. I think it's a great example of the question you just asked, because people

00:51:31.280 | would have applauded, others would have been, "This is horrible." Or we had a financial roadmap

00:51:37.280 | that had been put in place that said, "I'll make this amount of EPS by this date." There came a

00:51:41.520 | time we couldn't honor it because we had to invest. And so, there's a million of these decisions. I

00:51:47.760 | think most people that run firms, any size firm, they're just one right after another like that.

00:51:53.760 | And you're always making that short and long tension of, "What am I giving up?"

00:51:58.160 | What is that partnership like with the clients? Because you work with gigantic businesses.

00:52:02.480 | And what's it like sort of really forming a great relationship with them, understanding

00:52:11.200 | what their needs are, being in service of their needs?

00:52:14.320 | Yeah. Very simple. Honor your promises. And that happens over time. I mean, in service of,

00:52:22.400 | which is often why you can work with competitors, because if you are really in service of you and

00:52:27.360 | you need something, it takes two of us to do it, that becomes easier to do. Because I really,

00:52:32.240 | we both care, you get what you needed. And so, I can remember during one of the times I was on a

00:52:38.960 | European trip and at the time, a lot of, and this is still true, about views about technology and

00:52:46.800 | national technology giants and global ones and the pros and the cons. And countries want their

00:52:51.600 | own national champions, quite obvious. I mean, if I'm France or Germany. And there was a lot

00:52:56.560 | of discussion about security and data and who was getting access to what. And I can remember being

00:53:01.600 | in one of the, I was with Chancellor Merkel, I had met her many times. She's very well prepared,

00:53:06.560 | very well prepared every time, as you would know. And I started to explain all these things about

00:53:12.240 | why, how, you know, how we don't share data, how, who it belongs to. Our systems never had back

00:53:18.080 | doors. And she sort of stopped me. Like, you're one of the good guys. Like, stop. Now, that wasn't

00:53:24.480 | about me personally. She's talking about a company that's acted consistent with values for decades,

00:53:30.080 | right? So to me, how you work with those big kind of clients is you honor your promises. You say

00:53:37.200 | what you do and you do what you say. And you act with values over a long period of time. And that,

00:53:42.080 | to me, people say we're valued. It is not a fluffy thing. It is not a fluffy thing. It is a,

00:53:46.560 | I mean, if I was starting a company now, I'd spend a lot of time on that. On,

00:53:53.520 | you know, why we do what we do and why some things are tolerable and something,

00:53:58.800 | you know, what's your fundamental beliefs are. And many people sort of zoom past that stage,

00:54:03.200 | right? It's okay for a while. - And never sacrifice that.

00:54:07.040 | - You would never sacrifice that. I don't think you can.

00:54:10.400 | - So there was a lot of pressure when you took over as CEO and there was 22 consecutive quarters

00:54:16.320 | of revenue decline between 2012 and the summer of 2017. So it was a stressful time. Maybe not,

00:54:22.080 | maybe you can correct me on that. So as a CEO, what was it like going through that time,

00:54:28.720 | the decisions, the tensions in terms of investing versus making a profit?

00:54:33.840 | - I always felt that, that sense of urgency was so high. And even if I was calm on the outside,

00:54:41.040 | because you have one of the world's largest pensions. So, so many people depend on you.

00:54:46.880 | You have a huge workforce. They're depending on you. You have clients whose businesses don't run

00:54:50.720 | if you don't perform, et cetera. And shareholders, of course, right? And so, but I also am really

00:54:59.840 | clear. This was perhaps the largest reinvention IBM ever had to undertake. I had a board that

00:55:04.720 | understood that. In fact, some people, some of the headlines were like, this is existential,

00:55:09.440 | right? I mean, nobody gives you a right to exist forever. And there aren't many texts. You're the

00:55:13.600 | student of it. They are gone. They are all gone. And so if we didn't reinvent ourselves,

00:55:20.240 | we were going to be extinct. And so now, but you're big and it's like changing, what's that old

00:55:26.480 | saying? Can I change the wheels while the train's running or something like that? Or the engines

00:55:31.280 | while the plane's flying? And that's what you have to do. And that took time. And so, you know,

00:55:36.720 | Lex, do I wish it would have been faster? Absolutely. But the team worked so hard. And in

00:55:43.040 | that timeframe, 50% of the portfolio was changed. It's a very large company. And if you would,

00:55:51.840 | I also divested $10 billion to businesses. So if you would look at that growth rate without

00:55:56.880 | divestitures and currency, which now today everyone talks about currency. Back then,

00:56:01.040 | we were the only international guy. Net of divestitures and currency, the growth was flat.

00:56:07.120 | Is flat great? No, but flat for a big transformation. I was really proud of the

00:56:12.000 | team for what they did. That is actually pretty miraculous to have made it through that. I had

00:56:17.200 | my little nephew one day and he would see on TV occasionally when there'd be criticism,

00:56:21.280 | and he'd say, "You know, Auntie, does it make you mad when they talk mean?"

00:56:25.440 | CB: Yeah.

00:56:26.000 | DRH: And I just looked at him and I said, "How do you feel?" I said, "Look,

00:56:30.080 | I'm doing what has to be done." And I happened to be the one there. And if you have great conviction,

00:56:37.360 | and I did, a great conviction, I knew it was the right thing. I knew it would be needed for IBM to

00:56:43.280 | live its second century. And my successor, they have picked up, gone forward. I mean, you go back,

00:56:49.120 | we did the acquisition of Red Hat. I mean, we had to find our way on cloud, right? We were

00:56:53.440 | late to it. So we had to find our way. And eventually that led us to hybrid cloud.

00:56:57.920 | We did a lot of work with Red Hat back in 2017. Oh, we'd always done a lot of work with them.

00:57:03.440 | Actually, we were one of the first investors when they were first formed. But that was 2018.

00:57:08.880 | We took quite a hit for even--oh, it was the largest to then software acquisition ever.

00:57:14.080 | But it is the foundation, right, of what is our hybrid cloud play today and doing very, very well.

00:57:20.720 | But it had to take a short-term hit for that, right? Short-term hit for a very large $34 billion

00:57:26.480 | acquisition. But for all of us, it was the right thing to do. So I think when you get really

00:57:32.080 | centered on, you know it's the right thing to do, you just keep going, right?

00:57:35.680 | So the team had the vision, they had the belief, and everything else, the criticism doesn't matter.

00:57:39.600 | So we didn't always have exactly the right--this wasn't a straight arrow. But stay down,

00:57:45.120 | you know you're right, keep going. Okay, made a mistake. There's no bad mistake as long as

00:57:48.960 | you learn from it, right? And keep moving. So yes, did it take longer, but we are the largest

00:57:53.600 | that was there. Could you maybe just on a small tangent, educate me a little bit? So Red Hat

00:57:58.720 | originally is Linux, open source distribution of Linux, but it's also consulting. Well, it's--

00:58:04.240 | A little bit of consulting, but it's mostly software distribution. It's mostly Linux.

00:58:07.440 | It was mostly software. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

00:58:10.960 | So but today, IBM is very much, there's, you know--

00:58:14.080 | Services.

00:58:14.480 | Most IT services in the world is done by IBM. There's so many varied--so basically if you have

00:58:22.560 | issues, problems to solve in business, in the software space, IBM can help.

00:58:29.040 | Yes, and so in that my last year, our services business, we broke it into two pieces. And one

00:58:35.600 | piece was spun off into a company called Kindrel, which is managed outsourcing. Keeping things

00:58:41.120 | running, and they're off creating their own company. What IBM then retained is really the

00:58:45.840 | part I built with PWCC, the big consulting arm. And so today, the IBM of today in 2023 is,

00:58:53.120 | you know, at least ending 2022, was 30% consulting, and the other 70% would be,

00:58:58.320 | what would you consider software cloud AI? So hybrid cloud and AI is the other, and some

00:59:03.760 | hardware, obviously. Still, the mainframe is modernized, alive, and kicking, and still running

00:59:09.760 | some of the most important things of every bank you can think of practically in the world.

00:59:15.280 | And so that is the IBM of today versus perhaps, you know, and Red Hat is a big piece and an

00:59:23.600 | important part of that software portfolio. And they had some services with them for

00:59:27.600 | implementation, but it wasn't a very large part. And it's grown by leaps and bounds,

00:59:33.200 | you know, because originally the belief was everything was going to go to the public cloud.

00:59:36.880 | And at least many people thought that way. We didn't. In fact, I mean, we tried. We

00:59:44.000 | cured a public cloud company. We really tried to work it. But what we found was a lot of the

00:59:48.240 | mission critical work, it was tuned for consumer world. It wasn't tuned for the enterprise.

00:59:53.520 | So then time is elapsing here though, and you got to be at scale. And we didn't have

01:00:00.560 | any application. Remember, we're not an application company. So it wasn't like we had

01:00:04.720 | an office. We didn't have anything that like pulled things out to the cloud. And so as we

01:00:09.680 | look for what our best, what we really back to who you are, we really know mission critical work.

01:00:15.120 | We know where it lives today, and we know how to make it live on the cloud,

01:00:18.880 | which led us down hybrid cloud. You know, that belief that the real world would turn into,

01:00:23.360 | there'll be things on traditional that'll, you'll never move because it doesn't make sense.

01:00:27.680 | There'll be private clouds for, you know, have all the benefit of the cloud, but they just don't

01:00:32.000 | have, you know, infinite expansion. And then there'll be public clouds and you're going to

01:00:35.760 | have to connect them and be secure. And that's what took us down the path with Red Hat, that

01:00:40.400 | belief. - The structure of that is fundamentally different than something that's consumer facing.

01:00:44.320 | So the lesson you learn there is you can't just reuse something that's optimized for consumers.

01:00:49.520 | - Yeah, very interesting point. It doesn't mean consumer companies can't move up in the enterprise

01:00:52.560 | because obviously they have, right? But I think it's very hard to take something from the enterprise

01:00:56.960 | and come on down. - Sure.

01:00:58.080 | - And because it got to be simple, consumable, all the things we talked about already.

01:01:01.920 | - Plus you have to have the relationships with the enterprise.

01:01:03.920 | - Yeah, very different. Yeah. I mean, you know our history, right? At one time we had the PC business

01:01:08.160 | and, you know, the short answer to why we would not do that is it's a consumer facing business.

01:01:14.160 | We were good at the enterprise and that consumer business, A, highly competitive,

01:01:18.400 | got to be low cost, all the things that are not the same muscles necessarily of being in an

01:01:23.760 | innovation driven, you know, technology business. - Yeah, but what is now Lenovo, I guess that's

01:01:30.080 | what's just been done. - That's right, Lenovo acquired it.

01:01:31.920 | - They were extremely good at that, but not as good as you're saying as an enterprise.

01:01:37.440 | - Yeah, Lenovo's very good at their PC world, yes, and they can sell into the enterprise,

01:01:43.040 | right? But you as a consumer can go buy a Lenovo too. So look in China, right? Look in other places.

01:01:48.000 | So that's what I mean by consumer, you know, an end device. And that was a big decision because

01:01:52.480 | it would have been one of the last things that had our logo on it that sits in your hands, right? So

01:01:56.480 | when a new generation says, "Well, what does IBM do?" right? - Was that a difficult decision?

01:02:00.560 | Do you remember? - This is a long time ago now,

01:02:02.960 | it's like 2005. So they're all difficult because it's not only things, it's people.

01:02:08.800 | But it's back to knowing who you are is how I would sum that up as, right? And we were never

01:02:16.800 | great at making a lot of money at that. And you can remember originally it was IBM PC,

01:02:20.560 | then there were IBM clones, or they were called IBM clones back then as the field became highly,

01:02:26.960 | highly competitive. And as things commoditized, we often as they commoditize, we would move them

01:02:33.360 | out and move on to the next innovation level. - But because of that, it's not as public facing.

01:02:39.840 | - That's right. That's absolutely right. - Even though it's one of the most

01:02:41.200 | recognizable logos ever. - Yeah, isn't it true? That is very true.

01:02:44.640 | That is actually a very important point. And that is, you know, branding, as you say,

01:02:50.080 | one of the most recognizable and a very highly ranked brand strength around the world. And so

01:02:55.840 | that's a trade-off. I mean, I can't, you know, because there was a time you'd have something

01:03:02.160 | of IBM in your home or a cash register, as an example, you'd walk into a store, actually,

01:03:06.720 | they're still in places that went to Toshiba. - Can you speak to consulting a little bit? What

01:03:12.400 | does that entail? To train up, to hire a workforce that can be of service to all kinds of different

01:03:18.240 | problems in the software space, in the tech space. What's entailed in that?

01:03:22.320 | - I mean, you have to value a different set of things, right? And so you've got to always stay

01:03:28.640 | ahead. It's about hiring people who are willing to learn. It is about, at the same time, in my view,

01:03:36.320 | it's what really drives you to be customer-centric. - Maybe you can educate me. I think consulting is

01:03:43.440 | a kind of, you roll in and you try to solve problems that businesses have, like with expertise,

01:03:50.800 | right? - Okay. - Is that the process of consulting? - Somewhat, right? So, fair enough. When you say

01:03:56.880 | the word consulting, it's a really broad spectrum. I mean, I think people could be sitting here

01:04:00.880 | thinking it does any, it could be, I just give advice and I leave, to all the way to, I run your

01:04:06.080 | systems, right? And I think it's generally, people use the word to cover everything in that space.

01:04:12.480 | So we sort of fit in the spot, which is, we would come in and live at that intersection of business

01:04:17.920 | and technology. So yeah, we could give you recommendations and then we'd implement them

01:04:21.280 | and see them through, because we had the technology to go to the implementation and see them through.

01:04:24.880 | And at the time back then, that's what, there'd been five of those that had failed,

01:04:29.520 | that the companies had bought other consulting firms. And so we were, okay, that was the great

01:04:35.040 | thing about, I mean, the harrowing thing about it was, here, please go work on this. None of

01:04:38.960 | the others have ever succeeded before. And yet on the other hand, the great promise was, you could

01:04:43.760 | really, clients were dying at that time when we were doing that, to get more value out of their

01:04:48.400 | technology and have it really change the way the business worked. So I think of it as how to

01:04:52.960 | improve business and apply technology and see it all the way through. That's what we do today still.

01:04:56.720 | - Yeah, to see it all the way through. Yes. So let me say, it's almost like a personal question.

01:05:01.920 | So that was a big thing you were a part of that you led in 2002, that you championed and helped,

01:05:08.000 | I should say, negotiate the purchase of Monday, the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers

01:05:14.640 | for $3.5 billion. So what were some of the challenges of that that you remember,

01:05:19.840 | personal and business? - At that time, PW had to, really had to divest. And so they were in

01:05:29.040 | peril of going to IPO, right? So we sort of swept in at that point and said, and we'd been thinking

01:05:33.760 | about it a long time and started to work on that as an acquisition. So, kind of balancing which way

01:05:39.680 | would they go, IPO or acquisition. And so the challenges are obvious and part of it's why they

01:05:44.720 | went with us as an acquisition. Big difference to be a private firm than a public firm, very big.

01:05:49.520 | I can remember one of the guys, he asked somebody, "How long have you been with IBM?" And the person

01:05:53.600 | answered, "143 quarters." Okay, that's a little enlightening about a business model, right?

01:05:59.360 | So we had the challenges of being private versus public. You have the challenge of when you acquire

01:06:05.040 | something like that, as I say, you acquire hearts, not parts. They could leave. I mean,

01:06:10.400 | you could destroy your value by them leaving. They can walk right out the door. I mean, yes,

01:06:14.480 | you can put lots of restraints, but still, that you have there. And then we had to really build

01:06:20.400 | a new business model that people and clients would see as valuable and be willing to pay for.

01:06:26.320 | And so we had to do something that lived at that intersection and say that how this was unique is

01:06:31.760 | what we were doing. So you had the people aspect, you had that they were going to be public and they

01:06:37.840 | had always been private their whole life. And then you had the business model. So, and the others had

01:06:44.160 | all failed that had tried to do this. So yeah, it was a tough thing to do.

01:06:50.320 | What about the personal side of that? That was a big leap, step up for you. You've been at IBM

01:06:54.880 | for a long time. This is a big sort of leadership, like very impactful, large scale leadership

01:07:05.360 | decisions. What was that like? - So, unlike in my career earlier,

01:07:10.400 | where I said I was changing jobs, I said I wasn't comfortable, et cetera. So now here, fast forward

01:07:15.440 | 10 years, and I'm like, okay, honestly, how I felt inside on one hand, I did what I learned,

01:07:21.360 | like inventory what you know how to do. Like you have some good strengths that could work here.

01:07:26.400 | The other part of me said, boy, this is really high profile. And I felt, and I can remember

01:07:32.640 | saying to someone like, this is going to kill me or catapult, probably nothing in between.

01:07:38.560 | - And that wasn't terrifying to you? That was okay? You were okay with that kind of pressure?

01:07:41.520 | - I was okay with that because I felt I knew enough, you know, like these things I had,

01:07:47.200 | and I'll tell you the one thing I felt I knew the best. Consultants of any, worth their weight,

01:07:56.480 | they really do care that they deliver for an end client. And I felt I understood service to a

01:08:04.240 | client so well, that what it meant to really provide value. So I knew we would have like

01:08:09.280 | something that I knew the PwC people, more than anything, wanted to deliver value to those clients

01:08:14.720 | they had, next to then developing their people, that those were like the really two things.

01:08:18.960 | And that I could, and I also knew they felt they could do better if they had more technology.

01:08:23.680 | And we did. So there really was a reason, you know, that I could really believe in. So I

01:08:28.160 | authentically believed back to that point. And I also felt I had built some of those skills to be

01:08:33.760 | able to do that. But I wouldn't call it terrifying, but make no mistake, Lex, it was very hard. And

01:08:44.080 | it turned out to be extremely successful. By the time we ended, it was worth 19 and a half,

01:08:48.240 | well, the time I stepped, I ran it for, oh goodness gracious, quite a long time. I'm

01:08:53.360 | going to say seven or eight, nine years. And we were 19 and a half billion dollars.

01:08:58.960 | It made 2.7 billion in profit. It was very consequential to IBM. But the fact that it was

01:09:04.960 | consequential is also very, I mean, there was a time as we moved through it, I can even remember

01:09:10.400 | it. We just weren't meeting the goals as fast as we should. And some of it was clients were like,

01:09:15.440 | oh, now you're IBM. So, I mean, some things I knew would happen, but they happened so much faster.

01:09:21.360 | It'd be things like clients would say, oh, IBM cares about a quarter. So let's negotiate every

01:09:24.880 | quarter on these prices. And, you know, when they were private, they didn't have these issues. Well,

01:09:30.560 | that had an impact on margins really fast. And so that ability-

01:09:34.320 | So you picked up a lot of challenges.

01:09:35.760 | You pick them up right away. And I thought, oh boy, I mean, if I don't get this turned around,

01:09:41.360 | this is really a problem. And the team learned a lot of lessons. I mean, I learned people I had to

01:09:46.640 | move out, that I learned that when people don't believe they can do something, they probably won't

01:09:51.520 | do it. So, you know, we wanted to run the business at a certain level. I really did have some great

01:09:56.960 | leaders, but they didn't really believe it could do that. And I finally had to come to terms with,

01:10:00.800 | if you don't really believe in something, you really aren't going to probably make it happen

01:10:03.760 | at the end of the day. And so we would change that. We would have to actually get some more

01:10:09.760 | help to help us on doing so. But then it turned. And I can remember the day that we started

01:10:14.560 | really getting the business to hum and start to, it was almost like, finally. And I gave the team

01:10:20.960 | this little plaque, this little, it was kind of corny, paperweight thing. And I'm going to believe,

01:10:27.120 | remember if it was Thomas Edison, and he said, "Many of life's greatest failures are people who

01:10:33.920 | gave up right before they were going to be successful." And it's so true. I mean, there

01:10:40.560 | was also a governor of Texas who's passed, but she had said, someone said, "What's the secret

01:10:45.680 | of your success?" And she said, "It's passion and perseverance when everyone else would have given

01:10:50.560 | up." And I feel that's what that taught me. That taught me, like, no matter how bad this gets,

01:10:56.480 | you are not giving up. Now you can't keep doing the same thing, like the doctor, this hurts,

01:11:01.120 | oh, then stop doing it. You can't keep doing the same thing. We had to keep changing till we found

01:11:06.640 | our right way to get the model to work right. And client work, we never had an issue and kept so

01:11:14.160 | many of the people. And now we are 25 years almost later, and a number of them run parts of the IBM

01:11:21.440 | business still today. So it's that old Maya Angelou saying, when you say, "What do I remember?"

01:11:27.200 | They'll say, "You won't remember the specifics of this, but you'll remember how you felt." And

01:11:32.080 | that's kind of how I feel. And I think they do too, the whole team does, of that. Like,

01:11:35.600 | I'll get anniversary notes still on that, you know, when you've been through something like

01:11:40.960 | that together with people. So during the acquisition, the way you knew the people,

01:11:46.560 | it's the right team are the ones that could believe that this consulting business can grow,

01:11:52.240 | can integrate with IBM and all that. - Yeah, I was lucky. Look, I did things

01:11:56.240 | that helped that. I mean, I knew that people joining us would feel more comfortable if they

01:11:59.840 | had people leading it that they recognized, et cetera. But again, I learned those that didn't

01:12:06.160 | then, I eventually had to take some action out. But PWCC had a lot of really dedicated leaders

01:12:12.080 | to it and I give them a lot of credit. - Well, it's amazing to see a thing that

01:12:17.040 | kind of start at that very stressful time and then it turns out to be a success.

01:12:22.320 | - Yeah. - That's just beautiful to see. So

01:12:24.400 | what about the acquisition itself? Is there something interesting to say about the,

01:12:28.960 | like, what you learned about maybe negotiation? Because there's a lot of money involved too.

01:12:33.040 | - To me, it was a win-win and we both actually cared that customers got value. So there was this

01:12:39.520 | like third thing that had a benefit, not them, there was this third thing. And then next to that--

01:12:45.680 | - I like how you think that people would have the wisdom or what it takes to have great

01:12:50.640 | negotiation. But yeah, so it's a win-win is one of the ways you can have successful negotiation.

01:12:54.720 | - But it's like obvious to even say that, right? I mean, if you can, back to being in service of

01:12:58.480 | something, we were both in service of clients. So in and then, you know, I always say,

01:13:05.280 | when you have a negotiation with someone, okay, both parties always kind of walk away a little

01:13:09.920 | bit. Okay, that's good. If they both walk away going, "God, I should have got a little bit more.

01:13:14.160 | Okay, but it's okay if I should have got." Okay, they're both a little fussy. When one walks away

01:13:18.800 | and thinks they did great and the other one did horrible, they're usually like born bad. I mean,

01:13:22.720 | because they never worked that way. And I've always felt that way with negotiations that

01:13:29.600 | you push too far down and you usually will be sorry you did that, you know?

01:13:35.520 | - So don't push too far. I mean, that's ultimately what collaboration and empathy

01:13:40.080 | means is you're interested in the long-term success of everybody together versus like

01:13:45.120 | your short-term success. - And then you get the discretionary

01:13:47.040 | energy from them versus like, "Okay, you screwed me here. I'm done," right?

01:13:50.720 | - So let's even rewind even back. - Oh no. Oh no. Do you feel like this is

01:13:57.440 | a nostalgia interview? Oh no. - Let me just ask the romantic question.

01:14:01.120 | What did you love most about engineering, computer science, electrical engineering,

01:14:04.720 | so in those early days from your degree to the early work?

01:14:08.160 | - I love that logic part of it, right? And you do get a sense of completion at some point when

01:14:13.760 | you reach certain milestones that, you know, like, yes, it worked or yes, that finite answer to that.

01:14:20.080 | So that's what I loved about it. I loved the problem-solving of it.

01:14:22.880 | - Computing, what led you down that path? Computing in general, what made you fall in

01:14:27.040 | love with computing, with engineering? - It's probably that back to that desire,

01:14:32.480 | wanting to know how things work, right? And so that's like a natural thing. You know,

01:14:36.160 | math, I loved math for that reason. I always wanted to study how did that, you know,

01:14:39.760 | how did it get that to work kind of thing? So it goes back in that time. But I did start,

01:14:45.200 | when I went to, when I started at Northwestern, I was already in the engineering school,

01:14:48.400 | but my first thought was to be a doctor, that that was far more noble, that I should be a

01:14:51.840 | medical doctor until I could not pass human reproduction as a course. And I thought the

01:14:56.320 | irony that I could not, I'm like, I got all these colored pencils, I got all these pictures,

01:15:00.880 | this is not working out for me. - I'm gonna stick to math.

01:15:02.560 | - It was the only course in my four-year college education I had to take pass/fail,

01:15:07.200 | I guess, otherwise I risked, you know, impairing my grade point average.

01:15:11.840 | - Engineering it is. So, but after about 10 years, you jumped from the technical

01:15:16.640 | role of systems engineer to management, to a leadership role. Did you miss at that time

01:15:22.720 | the sort of the technical direct contribution versus being a leader, a manager?

01:15:26.640 | - That's an interesting point. Like I say, I've always been sort of a doer leader, you know, so.

01:15:31.600 | - So you never lost that. - I never really did. Even,

01:15:35.520 | you know, and I think this is really important for today. The best way people learn is experientially,

01:15:41.600 | I think. Now you may, that's being a generalization because there are people

01:15:44.800 | can learn all different ways, right? So I've done things like with my whole team,

01:15:50.400 | they all had to learn how to build cloud applications and call the code off. And so,

01:15:55.520 | you know, I don't care what your job is, write code, you know? And I remember when we were

01:16:01.920 | trying to get the company to understand AI, we did something called a cognitive jam. Okay,

01:16:06.720 | there's a reason we picked the word cognitive, by the way, instead of AI. Today we use the word AI.

01:16:10.480 | It was really symbolic. It was to mean, this is to help you think, not replace your thinking.

01:16:17.920 | There was so much in the zeitgeist about AI being a bad thing at that time. So that was why we picked

01:16:22.960 | a mouthful of a word like cognitive. And it was like, no, no, this is to help you actually. So

01:16:28.000 | do what, you know, do what you do better or do something you haven't yet learned. And we did

01:16:32.800 | something called the cognitive jam, but the whole point was everybody in the company could volunteer,

01:16:36.720 | get on a team. You either had to build something that improved one of our products, or did

01:16:41.120 | something for a client, or did a social, solved a social issue with AI. And again, this goes back

01:16:48.000 | now, 10 years, and people did things from bullying applications to, you know, railroad stuff to

01:16:55.440 | whatever it was, but it got like a hundred thousand people to understand, you know, viscerally what is

01:17:01.600 | AI. So that's a long answer to my belief around experiential. And so do you ever give it up?

01:17:07.280 | I don't think so. Cause I actually think that's pretty good to get your hands dirty

01:17:10.960 | in something. You know, you can't do it, you know, depending what you're doing,

01:17:14.160 | your effort to do that will be less, but.

01:17:16.160 | So even a CEO, you try to get your hands dirty a little bit.

01:17:20.720 | I've played, I mean, still, I'm not saying I'm any good at any of it anymore, but.

01:17:25.360 | But to build up intuition.

01:17:26.240 | But it's that, yeah, it's that really understand, right? And not be afraid of.

01:17:30.400 | Yeah. Like we mentioned at the beginning, IBM research has helped catalyze some of the

01:17:35.600 | biggest accomplishments in computing and artificial intelligence history. So D-Blue,

01:17:41.600 | IBM D-Blue versus Kasparov chess match in '96 and '97. Just to ask kind of like what your

01:17:49.840 | perception is, what your memory is of it, what is that moment? Like this seminal moment, I believe

01:17:55.760 | probably one of the greatest moments in AI history, when the machine first beat a human at a

01:18:01.040 | thing that humans thought.

01:18:02.960 | You make a very interesting point, because it is like one of the first demonstrations of using a

01:18:07.200 | game to like bring something to people's consciousness, right? And to this date,

01:18:10.960 | people use games, right, to demonstrate different things. But at the time, it's funny. I didn't

01:18:18.800 | necessarily think of it so much as AI, and I'll tell you why. I was, and I'm not a chess player,

01:18:23.200 | you might be a chess player, so I'm not expert at it. But I think I understand properly of chess,

01:18:27.920 | that chess has got a finite number of moves that can be made. Therefore, if it's finite,

01:18:32.640 | really what's a demonstration of a supercomputing, right? It's about the amount of time and how fast

01:18:37.600 | it can crunch through to find the right move. So in some ways, I thought of it as almost a

01:18:42.160 | bigger demonstration of that. But it is absolutely, as you said, it was a motivator, one of the big

01:18:48.160 | milestones of AI, because it put in your consciousness that it's man in this other

01:18:53.360 | machine, right? Doing something.

01:18:55.200 | So you saw it as just a challenging computation problem, and this is a way to demonstrate hardware

01:19:00.160 | and software computation at its best.

01:19:01.840 | Yes, I did.

01:19:02.880 | But the thing is, there is a romantic notion that chess is the embodiment of human intellect,

01:19:09.360 | I mean, intelligence, that you can't build a machine that can beat a chess champion in chess.

01:19:14.320 | See, and I was blessed by not being a chess expert, so it wasn't like,

01:19:18.000 | "Oh, I'm not a chess player."

01:19:18.320 | It's just a computation problem.

01:19:19.520 | It was a computation problem to me.

01:19:21.200 | Well, that's probably required to not be paralyzed by the immensity of the task,

01:19:26.800 | so that this is just solvable. But it was a very, very, I think that was a powerful moment,

01:19:32.720 | so speaking just as an AI person, that reinvigorated the dream.

01:19:39.520 | You were a little kid back then, though, right? At 95? You have to be, like, were you...

01:19:43.520 | Do you remember it, actually, at the moment?

01:19:45.920 | Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:19:47.280 | What did you think at the moment about it?

01:19:49.680 | Um, it was awe-inspiring, because, especially sort of growing up in the Soviet Union,

01:19:59.040 | you think, especially of Garry Kasparov and chess, like, your intuition is weak about those things.

01:20:06.880 | I didn't see it as computation. I thought of it as intelligence, because chess,

01:20:13.680 | for a human being, doesn't feel like computation.

01:20:16.800 | It feels like some complicated relationship between memory and patterns and intuition

01:20:23.840 | and guts and instinct and all of those, like...

01:20:28.240 | If you watch someone play, that's what you would conclude, right?

01:20:30.400 | So to see a machine be able to beat a human, I mean, you get a little bit of that with Chagy-Pity,

01:20:37.040 | now, it's like, language was to us humans the thing that we kind of...

01:20:42.800 | Surely, the poetry of language is something only humans can really have.

01:20:47.200 | It's going to be very difficult to replicate the magic of

01:20:51.200 | natural language without deeply understanding language.

01:20:55.120 | But it seems like Chagy-Pity can do some incredible things with language

01:20:59.600 | in natural language dialogue.

01:21:04.000 | But that was the first moment in AI.

01:21:07.440 | Through all the AI winters from the '60s, the promise of the...

01:21:10.960 | It was, wow, this is possible for a simple set of algorithms

01:21:17.920 | to accomplish something that we think of as intelligence.

01:21:20.160 | So that was truly inspiring, that maybe intelligence,

01:21:23.520 | maybe the human mind is just algorithms.

01:21:25.440 | That was the thought at the time.

01:21:27.680 | And of course, now, the funny thing, what happens is the moment you accomplish it,

01:21:32.480 | everyone says, "Oh, it's just brute force algorithms. It's silly."

01:21:36.400 | And this continues.

01:21:37.840 | Every single time you pass a benchmark, a threshold to win a game, people say,

01:21:43.040 | "Oh, well, it's just this."

01:21:45.920 | And I think that's funny.

01:21:49.040 | And there's going to be a moment when we're going to have to contend with AI systems that

01:21:54.480 | exhibit human-like emotions and feelings.

01:21:59.040 | And you have to start to have some difficult discussions about,

01:22:03.280 | well, how do we treat those beings?

01:22:05.200 | And what role do they have in society?

01:22:07.280 | What are the rules around that?

01:22:08.480 | And this is really exciting because that also puts a mirror to ourselves to see,

01:22:13.360 | okay, what's the right way to treat each other as human beings?

01:22:17.440 | Because it's a good test for that.

01:22:19.360 | - It is, because I always say it's a reflection of humanity.

01:22:23.440 | I mean, it's taught by what man...

01:22:26.000 | Bad stuff in the past, you'll teach it bad stuff for the future.

01:22:29.280 | Which is why I think efforts to regulate it are a fool's errand.

01:22:33.760 | You need to regulate uses.

01:22:35.040 | Because it's not the technology itself is not inherently good or bad,

01:22:39.360 | but how it's used or taught can be good or bad for sure.

01:22:42.640 | And so that's, to me, will unveil now a whole different way of having to look at technology.

01:22:49.120 | - What about another magical leap with the early days of Watson

01:22:52.880 | with beating the Jeopardy challenge?

01:22:54.560 | What was your experience like with Watson?

01:22:56.080 | And what's your vision for Watson in general?

01:22:57.840 | - Yeah, and it was really inspired by first chess, right?

01:23:01.280 | And Kasparov, and then you come forward in time.

01:23:04.080 | And I think what Watson did, because you used a really important word,

01:23:09.600 | AI had kind of waxed and waned in these winners, right?

01:23:12.640 | In and out, in and out, popular or not, more money, less money, in and out,

01:23:17.360 | confidence, no confidence.

01:23:18.800 | And so I think that was one of the first times it brought to the forefront of people like,

01:23:24.320 | "Whoa, I could humanized it."

01:23:26.480 | Because here it is playing against these two gentlemen.

01:23:29.520 | And as you did lose at first, and then finally won at the end of the day.

01:23:34.480 | And what it was doing is making you say, "Hey, natural language."

01:23:39.200 | It's actually understanding natural language.

01:23:40.800 | It's one of the first demonstrations of natural language support

01:23:43.680 | and bit of reasoning over lots of data, right?

01:23:47.200 | And so that it could have access to a lot of things,

01:23:50.320 | come up with a conclusion on it.

01:23:51.840 | And to me, that was a really big moment.

01:23:54.880 | And I do think it brought to the conscious of the public,

01:23:57.520 | and in good ways and bad, because it probably set expectations very high of like,

01:24:00.800 | "Whoa, what this could be."

01:24:02.160 | And I still do believe that it has got the ability to change

01:24:07.440 | and help us, man, make better decisions.

01:24:11.680 | That so many decisions are not optimal in this world.

01:24:14.240 | Even medical decisions.

01:24:16.080 | And it's right or wrong what took us down a path of healthcare first with our AI.

01:24:21.440 | And we took many pivots.

01:24:23.120 | And I think there's a really valuable lesson in what we learned.

01:24:26.240 | One is that, I actually don't think the challenges are the technology.

01:24:29.680 | Yes, those are challenges.

01:24:30.800 | But the challenges are the people challenges around this, right?

01:24:34.800 | So do people trust it?

01:24:36.320 | How will they use it?

01:24:38.000 | I mean, I saw that straight up with doctors and like,

01:24:43.760 | meaning they're so busy in the way they've been taught to do something.

01:24:46.960 | Do they really have time to learn another way?

01:24:49.840 | I saw it was a mistake when you put it on top of processes that didn't change,

01:24:53.120 | kind of like paving a cow path.

01:24:54.800 | - Mm-hmm. - Didn't work.

01:24:56.080 | I mean, it was all human change management around it that were really its biggest challenges.

01:25:01.520 | And another valuable lesson, we picked, back to usage, you think of IBM as moonshots.

01:25:06.320 | We picked really hard problems to start with.

01:25:08.560 | I think you see a lot of technology now starts with really simple problems.

01:25:12.400 | And by that, it probably starts to build trust because I start little.

01:25:17.280 | It's like, oh, I'm not ready to outsource my diagnosis to you,

01:25:20.480 | but I'll get some information here about a test question.

01:25:23.360 | So very different thinking.

01:25:25.040 | So a lot of things to learn.

01:25:26.480 | We were making a market at the time.

01:25:28.640 | And when you make a market, choice of problem you work on gets to be very important.

01:25:33.520 | When you're catching up, well, then it's a scale game.

01:25:36.000 | So very different thing.

01:25:37.520 | But Watson proved, I think, I mean, I hope I'm not being too...

01:25:44.240 | I think Watson brought AI back out a winner for the world.

01:25:47.760 | And that since then, there's just been one company after another

01:25:50.400 | and innovations and people working on it.

01:25:52.160 | And I have no regrets of anything that we did.

01:25:55.360 | We learned so much.

01:25:56.400 | I mean, we probably rebuilt it many times over.

01:25:58.960 | It made it more modular.

01:26:00.160 | And today, to IBM, a Watson is more about AI inside of a lot of things,

01:26:05.920 | if you think of it that way, which is more like an ingredient versus it's a thing in and of itself.

01:26:10.640 | And I think that's how it'll bring its real value.

01:26:12.720 | More as an ingredient, and it's so badly needed.

01:26:15.360 | And even back then, the issue was so much data.

01:26:18.160 | What do you ever do with it?

01:26:19.200 | You can't get through it.

01:26:20.000 | You can't use it for anything.

01:26:21.040 | You know this well, it's your profession.

01:26:22.800 | So we have to have it.

01:26:26.080 | So that's going to propel it forward.

01:26:28.080 | - So it's part of the suite of tools that you use when you go to enterprise

01:26:32.320 | and you try to solve problems.

01:26:34.080 | - Yeah, so AI for security, AI in automated operations, AI in your robotics,

01:26:38.480 | AI on your factory floor, you know what I mean?

01:26:40.080 | It's all part of.

01:26:41.680 | And I think, and that's why even to this day, thousands, I mean, thousands and thousands

01:26:46.160 | of clients of IBM still have the Watson components that it's the AI being used.

01:26:50.320 | So it became a platform is how I would say it, right?

01:26:53.040 | And an ingredient that went inside and consultants, like you said, had to learn.

01:26:59.520 | I had, they had to learn, don't just put it on something.

01:27:04.560 | You got to rethink how that thing should work,

01:27:06.880 | because with the AI, it could work entirely differently.

01:27:09.760 | And so I also felt it could open up and still will open up jobs to a lot of people,

01:27:15.040 | because more like an assistant, and it could help me be qualified to do something.

01:27:19.200 | And we even years ago saw this with the French banks, very unionized,

01:27:23.520 | but that idea that you could, in this case, the unions voted for it

01:27:27.840 | because it felt people did a better job.

01:27:29.840 | And so, and that's just part about being really dedicated

01:27:33.200 | to help it help humanity, not destroy it.

01:27:35.680 | Speaking of which, a funny side note.

01:27:38.800 | So Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey.

01:27:42.480 | What do you think about the fact that Hal 9000 was named after IBM?

01:27:48.800 | I really don't think it was.

01:27:50.080 | I know there's, I really don't.

01:27:51.600 | I've also-

01:27:52.080 | It could be more fake news.

01:27:53.520 | It's more fake news.

01:27:54.320 | I have done, I've like researched this, tried to find any evidence and people have talked to,

01:27:58.480 | was it really, one letter, it was one letter off, right?

01:28:01.760 | But people don't know H is one letter off of I, A is one letter off of B,

01:28:06.320 | and then L is one letter off of-

01:28:07.760 | That was the, I think that's a solution found afterwards, you know?

01:28:10.960 | Yeah, that's hilarious.

01:28:11.680 | But here's what I think it more was.

01:28:13.520 | I do think it's one of the early demonstrations of evil AI.

01:28:16.960 | Yeah.

01:28:17.280 | Like can be taught bad.

01:28:18.560 | I could push back on that because it's presented as evil in the movie

01:28:23.040 | because it hurts, the AI hurts people.

01:28:25.280 | But it's a really interesting ethical question because the role of Hal 9000

01:28:30.640 | is to carry out a successful mission.

01:28:33.840 | And so the question that is a human question, it's not an AI question,

01:28:38.880 | at what price?

01:28:40.000 | Humans wage war.

01:28:41.760 | They pay very heavy costs for a vision, for a goal of a future that creates a better world.

01:28:51.520 | And so that's the question certainly in space.

01:28:54.080 | Doctors ask that question all the time,

01:28:55.520 | but the limited resources, who do I allocate my time and money and efforts?

01:28:59.040 | I agree.

01:28:59.760 | Like I said, I've spent a decade talking about this question of AI ethics, right?

01:29:02.960 | And that it needs really considerable, not just attention,

01:29:06.640 | because otherwise it will mirror everything we love and everything we don't love.

01:29:12.000 | And again, and that's the beauty in the eye of the beholder, right?

01:29:14.640 | Depending your culture and everything else.

01:29:16.240 | With what you're doing and what you're going to do, how do you think about it?

01:29:21.040 | Do you think about the AI you're going to develop as having guardrails

01:29:24.800 | dictated by some of your beliefs or?

01:29:28.240 | Yeah, for sure.

01:29:29.200 | So there's so many interesting ways to do this the right way,

01:29:33.360 | and I don't think anyone has an answer.

01:29:35.280 | I tend to believe that transparency is really important.

01:29:37.920 | So I think some aspect of your work should be open-sourced

01:29:43.040 | or at least have an open-source competitor

01:29:45.920 | that creates a kind of forcing function for transparency of how you do things.

01:29:50.720 | So the other is, I tend to believe,

01:29:54.000 | maybe it's because of the podcast and I've just talked to a lot of people,

01:29:57.440 | you should know the people involved.

01:29:59.360 | I agree 100%.

01:30:00.960 | As opposed to hide behind a company wall.

01:30:03.520 | Sometimes there's a pressure, you have a PR team,

01:30:05.920 | you have to care for investors and discussion, so on, let's protect,

01:30:09.440 | let's surely not tweet, not this.

01:30:12.000 | Like, and you form this bubble

01:30:14.320 | where you have incredible engineers doing fascinating work

01:30:17.600 | and also doing work that's difficult, complex human questions being answered.

01:30:23.680 | And we don't know about any of them as a society.

01:30:26.320 | And so we can't really have that conversation.

01:30:28.720 | Even though that conversation would be great for hiring,

01:30:31.440 | it would be great for revealing the complexities of what the company is facing.

01:30:35.680 | So when the company makes mistakes,

01:30:37.200 | you understand that it wasn't malevolence or half-assedness

01:30:42.000 | and the decision-making is just a really hard problem.

01:30:44.720 | And so I think transparency is just good for everybody.

01:30:47.280 | And I mean, in general,

01:30:51.520 | just having a lot of public conversations about this is serious stuff.

01:30:55.520 | It's that AI will have a transformative impact on our society

01:31:00.960 | and it might do so very, very quickly

01:31:03.280 | through all kinds of ways we're not expecting,

01:31:05.360 | which is social media recommendation systems.

01:31:07.760 | They at scale have impact on the way we think,

01:31:11.760 | on the way we consume news and our growth,

01:31:17.360 | like the kind of stuff we consume to grow and learn

01:31:19.520 | and become better human beings, all of that, that's all AI.

01:31:22.800 | And then obviously the tools that run companies on which we depend,

01:31:28.000 | the infrastructure in which we depend,

01:31:29.600 | we need to know all about those AI decisions.

01:31:32.640 | And it's not as simple as,

01:31:34.160 | well, we don't want the AI to say these specific set of bad things.

01:31:38.800 | - Right.

01:31:39.280 | - It's unfortunately, I don't believe it's possible to--

01:31:41.760 | - It's not.

01:31:42.320 | - Prevent evil or bad things

01:31:48.480 | by creating a set of cold mathematical rules.

01:31:51.760 | - Yeah.

01:31:52.240 | - Unfortunately, it's all fuzzy and gray areas.

01:31:54.480 | It's all a giant mess.

01:31:55.520 | - It is.

01:31:56.080 | I mean, you think about it like a knife.

01:31:57.440 | A knife can do good and a knife can do bad.

01:31:59.440 | Okay, you can't, it's very hard.

01:32:01.200 | - You can't ban knives.

01:32:02.160 | - You can't ban knives.

01:32:03.280 | And that this is, I think back, it was probably 20, I don't know, 15, 16,

01:32:09.200 | we did principles of trust and transparency.

01:32:11.360 | Notice the word transparency, that belief that with AI,

01:32:14.480 | it should be explainable.

01:32:15.760 | You should know who taught it.

01:32:16.960 | You should know the data that went into training it.

01:32:19.360 | You should know who, how it was written.

01:32:21.680 | If it's being used, you have a right to know these things.

01:32:24.160 | And I think those are pretty, to this day,

01:32:26.960 | really powerful principles to be followed, right?

01:32:29.920 | And part of it, we ended up writing,

01:32:31.760 | 'cause here we were when we were working on particularly healthcare,

01:32:34.240 | like, okay, you care who trained it and what, and where did,

01:32:38.320 | and that's sort of, you know, that comes to your mind.

01:32:41.280 | You're like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense

01:32:42.480 | for something important like that.

01:32:43.600 | But it just in general, people won't trust the technologies,

01:32:47.120 | I don't think, unless they have transparency into those things.

01:32:50.480 | In the end, they won't really trust it.

01:32:51.840 | - I think a lot of people would like to know, sort of,

01:32:55.280 | 'cause a lot of us, I certainly do,

01:32:58.960 | suffer from imposter syndrome, that self-critical brain.

01:33:02.240 | So, you know, taking that big step into leadership,

01:33:05.760 | did you at times suffer from imposter syndrome?

01:33:08.240 | Like, how did I get here?

01:33:09.600 | Do I really belong here?

01:33:10.880 | Or were you able to summon the courage

01:33:13.440 | and sort of the confidence to really step up?

01:33:15.680 | - Hmm.

01:33:19.200 | I think that's very natural for someone.

01:33:21.600 | Like, no matter, like the bigger the job gets,

01:33:23.600 | you turn and you look to the left and the right

01:33:27.440 | and you see people around you and you think,

01:33:29.520 | what am I doing here, right?

01:33:30.960 | But then you remember what you do

01:33:32.960 | and there's no one else doing it.

01:33:36.000 | And so you get that confidence.

01:33:38.240 | So I do hear a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome,

01:33:41.680 | right?

01:33:42.560 | And I kind of, actually this past year,

01:33:47.200 | I've spent some time helping people on that topic.

01:33:49.280 | And part of the stress, you have to believe

01:33:54.720 | you have a right to be there like anyone else does

01:33:58.240 | if you've prepared for that moment, you know?

01:34:00.000 | And so it's a bit more of a,

01:34:02.160 | I know it's hard to say it,

01:34:04.800 | like a confidence thing more than anything else.

01:34:06.960 | So yes, there are times I look around,

01:34:09.120 | but then I think, wow,

01:34:10.800 | I'm in a position to make something change.

01:34:12.400 | So I can't say I have ever really dwelled

01:34:15.680 | on that feeling for long.

01:34:16.640 | - Okay, so you just focus on the work,

01:34:18.000 | I have an opportunity, I'm gonna stop propagating.

01:34:18.960 | - You know, it's good or bad, I just focus on the work.

01:34:21.440 | Yeah, good or bad, yeah.

01:34:22.960 | - One important lesson you said you learned from your mom

01:34:26.320 | is never let anyone else define you.

01:34:29.200 | Only you define who you are.

01:34:30.560 | So what's the trajectory, let's say,

01:34:34.320 | of your self-definition journey,

01:34:36.160 | of you discovering who you are?

01:34:40.000 | From having that very difficult upbringing.

01:34:42.960 | - You know, they say pivotal moments happen

01:34:45.920 | and you don't realize it when they're happening.

01:34:47.760 | So most of my, I feel like most of my self-discovery,

01:34:51.920 | it's been like something happens in a year or two

01:34:55.440 | or some number later, I look back on it and say,

01:34:58.160 | you know, I learned this from that.

01:35:00.320 | It's like not in the moment always with me.

01:35:02.160 | That could just be how I am.

01:35:04.080 | So I feel like it's been,

01:35:06.160 | know yourself, it's a good thing, right?

01:35:09.600 | I've actually heard you say that on different podcasts

01:35:11.520 | when you ask people questions, you're like,

01:35:13.360 | well, it depends, you know, like know yourself a bit, right?

01:35:16.080 | - It's hard to know who you are though.

01:35:18.000 | There's a lot of things, like you said,

01:35:19.680 | like for me, there's moods when you're super self-critical,

01:35:23.920 | sometimes you're super confident,

01:35:25.440 | and there's many, sometimes you're emotional,

01:35:28.080 | sometimes you're cool under pressure,

01:35:29.520 | and all those are the same human being.

01:35:32.480 | - Yeah, and I think that's fine.

01:35:33.600 | (Lex laughing)

01:35:35.600 | Self-awareness, that's different.

01:35:37.200 | - Was there societal expectations and norms

01:35:40.000 | regarding gender that you felt in your career?

01:35:44.800 | You've spoken to that a little bit,

01:35:46.080 | but was there some aspect of that

01:35:47.600 | that was constraining, empowering, or both?

01:35:50.480 | - You know, I chose to never look at it, okay?

01:35:55.360 | Now, whether that is right or wrong,

01:35:56.880 | and again, I'm a product of the '70s,

01:35:58.720 | and '70s and the '80s where I think I was surrounded,

01:36:02.480 | all the other women around me

01:36:04.160 | viewed our way to get ahead was just to work hard.

01:36:06.240 | Work hard, work hard,

01:36:07.200 | and that was the way you differentiated yourself.

01:36:10.080 | And that's obvious it did help.

01:36:12.320 | I mean, there's no doubt about it.

01:36:13.520 | You're always, you know, you learned a lot of things,

01:36:15.680 | which qualified opened up another door,

01:36:17.040 | opened up another door.

01:36:18.080 | I'm very remindful that I have worked for companies

01:36:22.560 | that are very steeped in those values of equal opportunity.

01:36:25.920 | And so nothing remarkable about that.

01:36:28.640 | And I mean, when I was a wee kid,

01:36:31.040 | I'm taught hire a diverse team.

01:36:33.840 | I get evaluated for it.

01:36:36.960 | I get evaluated if my team has built up their skills.

01:36:39.920 | So this is, you know, when you're really formative,

01:36:42.080 | you're in a culture that that's what it's valuing, right?

01:36:44.880 | So it becomes part of you.

01:36:46.480 | So I say sometimes to Chagrin,

01:36:49.040 | "Did I ever feel I was held back for that reason?"

01:36:51.760 | Now, were there plenty of times when,

01:36:53.120 | you know, I write about a few of the stories in the book,

01:36:55.680 | I'm laying cables at night and the guys are at the bar.

01:36:58.160 | Now, I didn't really wanna go with them to the bar anyways.

01:37:00.640 | They'd be like, "We'll be back to get you, you know, bye."

01:37:03.360 | And I'm like, "Okay."

01:37:04.080 | I mean, I learned a lot.

01:37:06.240 | So it didn't.

01:37:07.360 | Now, all that said,

01:37:09.280 | back to my earlier story about being a role model,

01:37:11.600 | you know, it would be foolish to not believe

01:37:15.120 | that there were times that that mattered.

01:37:16.800 | And I would say two things,

01:37:21.840 | even not that long ago,

01:37:23.200 | you know, a colleague called me

01:37:25.600 | and I was talking about media and about women CEOs

01:37:30.160 | and said, "Do you notice that sometimes

01:37:31.840 | when it's a woman CEO, they call the person by name

01:37:33.920 | and when it's a man, they call the company out,

01:37:36.400 | not the person's name exactly associated with the issue."

01:37:39.200 | And I said, "Yeah, well, I think you have to just understand

01:37:42.880 | much of what you do, it will be magnified

01:37:45.840 | 'cause there are so few of you.

01:37:47.200 | And sometimes it will be, you know,

01:37:49.920 | really can be blown out of proportion, right?

01:37:52.160 | And so that can happen

01:37:54.240 | and you gotta learn in which way.

01:37:57.520 | Now, all that said, on gender,

01:37:59.840 | it is an interesting thing with the book

01:38:01.440 | as I've talked to, you know, having a book,

01:38:03.680 | even some of my best friends, the first reaction is,

01:38:06.720 | "I can't wait for my daughter to read it."

01:38:08.160 | I say, "Well, that's interesting,

01:38:11.040 | do you think you could read it?"

01:38:12.000 | - Yeah, it's fascinating.

01:38:14.320 | - It's an interesting reaction.

01:38:15.680 | And here I am 40 years later,

01:38:17.120 | that's an interesting reaction, right?

01:38:18.960 | And I say, "No, the book, I really worked hard

01:38:21.680 | to write it for everyone,

01:38:23.200 | I just happened to be a woman, right?"

01:38:25.280 | But there's still that there.

01:38:27.920 | And so look, until I think people see

01:38:30.640 | and never feel that they have a,

01:38:32.960 | it doesn't even matter whether there's a woman,

01:38:34.160 | it could be another diverse group that feels it.

01:38:36.080 | It's okay to ask those questions.

01:38:38.640 | And that's why actually I'm okay talking about it

01:38:40.480 | because there were times I felt it, right?

01:38:42.800 | There were times in my life on my looks or my weight

01:38:45.360 | or my clothing or endless numbers of things

01:38:48.320 | that people would comment on

01:38:49.920 | that they would not have commented on

01:38:51.680 | if it was someone else.

01:38:53.600 | Now, on the other hand, when there's so few of you

01:38:58.640 | and there's good and bad,

01:39:02.000 | I mean, there's benefit to that too, right?

01:39:03.600 | If you do good work, it's easier to be recognized.

01:39:07.600 | And so a pro and a con,

01:39:09.600 | and I think I've just grown up believing

01:39:13.040 | like my advice to young women going to engineering,

01:39:15.680 | not 'cause you're gonna be an engineer,

01:39:16.880 | it teaches you to solve problems

01:39:18.240 | and anything new job you do is gonna be solving problems.

01:39:20.480 | Things like that are what I take away from that

01:39:24.480 | in that journey.

01:39:25.200 | - It is interesting that I hear from women

01:39:28.000 | that even on this podcast,

01:39:31.120 | when I talk to incredible women like yourself,

01:39:35.760 | it is inspiring to young women to hear.

01:39:37.920 | I mean, you like to see,

01:39:39.280 | you talk to somebody from Turkey

01:39:41.280 | and then Turkish people all get excited.

01:39:42.960 | - It's so true.

01:39:44.480 | - So you get like somebody that looks like you,

01:39:46.800 | somebody that, and the category could be tiny,

01:39:50.240 | it can be huge.

01:39:52.400 | That's just the reality of the world.

01:39:53.920 | - It is the reality of the world.

01:39:54.960 | And the work I do now to put,

01:39:57.440 | this group called One Tent,

01:39:58.560 | put 1 million black employees into the middle class

01:40:00.800 | without college degrees,

01:40:01.840 | get them the right skills, upwardly mobile jobs.

01:40:04.160 | So one of my last years,

01:40:07.040 | we had been working on,

01:40:09.440 | it just did regular leadership session at IBM

01:40:11.520 | and had our black colleagues,

01:40:12.720 | we're talking about what did it feel like

01:40:14.080 | to be a black leader?

01:40:15.360 | And here, these are extremely accomplished people.

01:40:18.160 | And I can remember very well

01:40:20.320 | when telling a story about,

01:40:21.680 | look, I felt if I failed or succeeded,

01:40:24.960 | it's not just me,

01:40:26.240 | it came from a country in Africa.

01:40:27.760 | I feel like the whole country is on my shoulder,

01:40:30.480 | my success or failure.

01:40:31.920 | That's a burden.

01:40:32.880 | I mean, like I don't feel that burden.

01:40:34.720 | Not true, as a woman CEO,

01:40:36.880 | I did feel like,

01:40:37.680 | even the headlines when I was named said,

01:40:40.400 | her appointment will either,

01:40:42.800 | her success or failure will be a statement

01:40:44.960 | for the whole gender kind of thing.

01:40:46.400 | And I didn't dwell on it,

01:40:49.040 | but I meant that's,

01:40:50.000 | but I could see how people,

01:40:51.200 | like you said, it could be a small group,

01:40:52.480 | could be whatever.

01:40:53.520 | And so that is a lot of pressure on people

01:40:55.600 | and they need role models.

01:40:56.640 | You're a role model for people.

01:40:57.760 | Look at what you're able to do.

01:40:58.800 | You do these podcasts,

01:40:59.840 | you understand your science very well,

01:41:01.840 | you're very well prepared,

01:41:02.960 | your ability to translate it to people.

01:41:05.200 | That's not an insignificant thing.

01:41:07.840 | And you may think,

01:41:08.480 | oh, is that about the power of me?

01:41:10.480 | Not really, right?

01:41:11.360 | And you obviously believe,

01:41:13.040 | you don't do this because

01:41:14.400 | you just like sitting at a microphone.

01:41:16.000 | You do it because you think,

01:41:17.040 | okay, if I can get people to say things

01:41:18.720 | that are really valuable to other people,

01:41:20.160 | they're gonna learn something.

01:41:21.360 | I assume that is,

01:41:22.240 | I mean, you never told me my interpretation is,

01:41:24.720 | that's why you do this podcast,

01:41:26.320 | that you feel like in service of other people

01:41:28.400 | that you can bring them something unique

01:41:30.720 | by the way you do this.

01:41:31.760 | Now, I should ask you, why do you do it?

01:41:33.840 | That's my impression.

01:41:34.800 | - By the way, can I just comment on the fact

01:41:36.480 | that you keep asking me really hard questions?

01:41:38.400 | (both laughing)

01:41:39.200 | I really appreciate it.

01:41:40.960 | - It's in your own medicine.

01:41:41.520 | - I love this.

01:41:42.560 | I'm really honored by it.

01:41:43.920 | As a fan of a podcast myself,

01:41:48.000 | what I hope is to talk to people like you

01:41:51.920 | and to show that you are a fascinating

01:41:55.280 | and beautiful human being

01:41:56.960 | outside of your actual accomplishments also.

01:41:59.760 | So sometimes people are very focused on

01:42:02.480 | very specific things about, like you said, science,

01:42:05.920 | like what the actual work is,

01:42:07.840 | whether it's nuclear fusion or it's GIGPT.

01:42:10.640 | I just wanna show that it's,

01:42:13.200 | because I see it at MIT and everywhere,

01:42:17.040 | it's just human beings trying their best.

01:42:19.200 | They're flawed, but just realizing

01:42:22.400 | that all of these very well accomplished people

01:42:25.360 | are all the same.

01:42:26.160 | - Yeah, that's a very good, well said.

01:42:28.160 | - And then so then regular people and young people,

01:42:30.640 | they're able to see, I can do this too.

01:42:33.440 | I can have a very big impact.

01:42:34.720 | - No imposter syndrome, right?

01:42:35.120 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:42:36.160 | It's like we're all kind of imposters.

01:42:38.240 | We're all like trying to figure it out.

01:42:39.600 | - To a certain degree.

01:42:41.680 | - So let me just ask you about family.

01:42:44.000 | You wrote that, "My family still jokes

01:42:46.080 | "that the reason I never had children on my own

01:42:49.040 | "was because I had already raised my family."

01:42:51.600 | They're right.

01:42:52.720 | So this is talking to you about upbringing,

01:42:54.400 | but in general, what was your,

01:42:55.680 | you know, leading a giant company,

01:42:58.800 | what was the right place to find a work-life balance for you

01:43:03.600 | to have time for family,

01:43:05.840 | have time for away from work and be successful?

01:43:09.600 | - So I had to learn that.

01:43:10.560 | And I might've said, you know,

01:43:12.320 | you're the only one that can determine

01:43:14.400 | your own work-life balance.

01:43:15.760 | Companies are innate things.

01:43:16.960 | I mean, they will take everything they can from you.

01:43:18.720 | And it's not a bad thing.

01:43:19.760 | They just will, as will bosses.

01:43:21.200 | I mean, you give it, they'll take it.

01:43:23.760 | And when people ask for, you know, I need a roof,

01:43:26.000 | I'm like, okay, I had to come with terms with,

01:43:28.640 | the criminal was me if I needed that balance.

01:43:31.760 | I had to set those boundaries.

01:43:33.200 | And so when I comment about a family,

01:43:36.160 | because I am in extreme awe of people with children who work,

01:43:39.840 | it is a extremely hard thing to do.

01:43:43.360 | I watch my siblings.

01:43:44.400 | I love my nieces and nephews.

01:43:45.760 | And, whew, you know, A, the emotional,

01:43:50.080 | their pain is your pain every minute of the day.

01:43:52.160 | And then you still have a job on top of it.

01:43:54.000 | And so when my mom had to go back to school

01:43:56.960 | and had to work, I was the one.

01:43:58.960 | And so when she couldn't go to the teacher meeting,

01:44:01.440 | I went to the teacher meeting.

01:44:02.480 | And so in some ways, there's an age gap

01:44:04.880 | between my brother and I and my other two sisters.

01:44:06.720 | And so I'm still, they still call me mama bear even.

01:44:11.280 | I mean, I'm extremely protective of all of them.

01:44:14.240 | And it is as if I had raised them.

01:44:16.880 | And my mom did a great job raising them.

01:44:18.480 | I didn't, but I was there.

01:44:20.400 | And so when it came time to have children,

01:44:24.640 | and my husband came from a family where his father died

01:44:28.000 | and was raised by a single mother,

01:44:29.280 | very similar end point, different reasons why he ended up,

01:44:34.400 | you know, his father did not abandon them.

01:44:37.120 | And I don't want people to believe to do my job,

01:44:41.600 | you can have no children.

01:44:42.800 | That is not right.

01:44:44.240 | I know other great women CEOs,

01:44:46.240 | Marilyn Hewson, who ran Lockheed Martin,

01:44:49.120 | extremely technical company,

01:44:50.400 | Mary Barra, who runs General Motors,

01:44:52.400 | Ellen Coleman, who run DuPont.

01:44:54.000 | These are all my friends to this day.

01:44:55.520 | And they've been fantastic mothers

01:44:59.200 | and husbands, good parents, right?

01:45:01.440 | And so I talk about it because it was a choice we made.

01:45:04.640 | And so, you know, we both felt, look,

01:45:07.440 | we'd reached a point where for his reasons,

01:45:10.160 | what he had to do, I'd already felt that way.

01:45:12.880 | And that we were comfortable

01:45:14.240 | just being great aunts and uncles,

01:45:15.440 | and I'm a great aunt, you know?

01:45:16.640 | Well, I like to think that for my little guys,

01:45:19.040 | and they're older now, but lots of them.

01:45:21.920 | And there's no doubt though, the choices we made,

01:45:26.240 | Mark and I, that that made it easier

01:45:29.680 | for me to focus on work.

01:45:31.040 | I mean, it's just math, you know,

01:45:33.920 | when you've got less people to have to take care of.

01:45:36.160 | And so I'm very considerate of that.

01:45:40.000 | And I think much of it informed

01:45:41.520 | many of the policies I put into,

01:45:42.960 | because I had such great empathy

01:45:44.720 | for those who then still had

01:45:46.400 | these other responsibilities.

01:45:47.920 | And I desperately wanted them all

01:45:49.920 | to stay in the workforce.

01:45:51.440 | So I can remember, and my siblings have been

01:45:54.240 | more successful than I, by the way,

01:45:56.480 | I mean, to my mother's credit.

01:45:57.760 | And my one sister who, you know,

01:46:02.400 | went to Northwestern, has an MBA,

01:46:04.160 | built some of the most sophisticated systems.

01:46:06.560 | She spent her whole career at Accenture

01:46:09.840 | and just recently retired as a chief executive

01:46:11.920 | of all of consulting.

01:46:13.280 | But at one point she took off time

01:46:15.280 | to spend with her family

01:46:16.800 | and then went to go back to work.

01:46:18.480 | She's talking to me and she's like,

01:46:20.000 | "I don't know if I should go back to work.

01:46:21.360 | You know, maybe life's path,

01:46:22.320 | you know, technology goes so fast.

01:46:23.920 | It's been a few years."

01:46:24.800 | I'm sitting there like,

01:46:26.640 | "What are you talking about?"

01:46:28.800 | I'm like, you know, look at her credentials.

01:46:30.800 | They're far outstanding.

01:46:32.640 | I'm like, and I thought to myself,

01:46:34.640 | like, ding, one of those moments,

01:46:36.320 | if my own sister feels that way

01:46:38.560 | with all her credentials,

01:46:40.080 | I'll bet I went back to work the next day

01:46:42.480 | and I said, "Hey, pull for me."

01:46:43.840 | All the people who've left

01:46:45.040 | for parental reasons

01:46:46.320 | and or whatever, family reasons,

01:46:48.640 | didn't come back.

01:46:49.360 | And it began a program of return ships.

01:46:51.920 | And I can't tell you how many,

01:46:53.040 | in men and women,

01:46:53.840 | was because they didn't feel confident to come back.

01:46:56.240 | They thought technology passed them by.

01:46:58.800 | Okay, we said, "It's three months.

01:47:00.320 | You could stay one month, three months,

01:47:01.600 | it doesn't matter."

01:47:02.560 | Well, a lot of people like one day,

01:47:03.680 | they're like, "You're right, not that much happened."

01:47:05.200 | (laughing)

01:47:06.000 | It happened, but I caught up.

01:47:07.440 | I actually know more than I think.

01:47:08.560 | So, it was a long answer to your question about,

01:47:14.240 | I didn't, but I am so empathetic

01:47:16.240 | and I am in awe of what they are able to do.

01:47:19.120 | And it made me then, I think,

01:47:21.520 | more empathetic to the policies and the like

01:47:23.440 | around that topic,

01:47:24.960 | so you could keep great people in the workforce.

01:47:26.640 | - So you mentioned your friends with Mayabara,

01:47:28.560 | the CEO of GM.

01:47:30.480 | - I didn't mean to name drop.

01:47:33.360 | - No, I love her, she's amazing.

01:47:35.680 | So I just wanted to, I'm just curious,

01:47:37.040 | do you guys-- - I'll tell Mary

01:47:37.600 | she should do your podcast.

01:47:39.040 | - We'll make it happen, but--

01:47:40.080 | - She's a great leader.

01:47:41.200 | I tell Mary what I think of her

01:47:43.120 | is I think she's one of the most authentic leaders out there,

01:47:45.840 | most authentic.

01:47:46.800 | - I mean, just very different companies, huge challenges.

01:47:49.920 | - I worked there first, though, remember, right?

01:47:51.360 | So I'm very, in some ways, I'm very beholden, right?

01:47:55.120 | I'm very appreciative of what they did.

01:47:57.280 | I mean, Mary and I are circa the same,

01:47:58.560 | well, I'm a bit older, so, but circa that genre.

01:48:01.680 | - Do you exchange wisdoms?

01:48:03.040 | - Oh yeah, yeah.

01:48:04.000 | When you do anything hard, it takes time and perseverance,

01:48:07.040 | like we talked about.

01:48:07.840 | And you can get that, where do you get the fuel for it?

01:48:13.440 | You can either get it from your attitude,

01:48:15.360 | or you can get it from your network or your relationships.

01:48:18.080 | And I'm a firm believer relationships are from what you give,

01:48:21.840 | not what you get.

01:48:22.880 | Meaning you give, trust me, they will come back

01:48:25.680 | at the time they need to come back to you

01:48:27.360 | at these moments in life.

01:48:28.880 | If you focus on how can I bring lex value,

01:48:33.200 | there'll be a day I need lex, he will be back.

01:48:35.680 | And so to those women,

01:48:38.480 | to me, relationships are not transactional.

01:48:40.560 | And it's a proof that to this day,

01:48:44.320 | even though I'm no longer still active as a CEO,

01:48:46.800 | these are all still my friends.

01:48:48.480 | And we are friends, all of us.

01:48:51.040 | And I can remember some of them

01:48:53.760 | when I first became a CEO calling me and saying,

01:48:55.920 | "Hey, it's a little lonely here, so let me talk to you."

01:48:59.360 | And then when they became, I did the same for them.

01:49:01.840 | And then they remember,

01:49:03.040 | and they do for the next generation.

01:49:04.640 | And so it's a very supportive, almost to a T,

01:49:11.040 | any of the women you could name who have been CEOs,

01:49:13.680 | I would say, almost to a T, have all been very supportive.

01:49:17.120 | In fact, a number of us work on a little,

01:49:18.400 | another non-for-profit right now called Journey,

01:49:20.480 | which some women who had started,

01:49:22.720 | the Fortune's Most Powerful Women had started,

01:49:24.800 | which was, could we get more women,

01:49:27.680 | particularly diverse women, but women in general,

01:49:29.360 | to more quickly be into positions of leadership and power.

01:49:32.800 | And so many of the women you named and more,

01:49:35.520 | we all dedicate time mentoring

01:49:37.600 | in kind of creating this little group of fellows

01:49:40.720 | every year to do this.

01:49:41.520 | - Friendship and love is core to this whole thing,

01:49:43.680 | not just the success, but just the whole human condition.

01:49:46.480 | Let me ask one last question, advice for young people.

01:49:49.920 | You've had a difficult upbringing, a difficult life,

01:49:53.760 | and you've become one of the most successful

01:49:56.160 | human beings in history.

01:49:57.520 | What advice would you give to young people,

01:49:59.600 | or just people in general who are struggling a bit,

01:50:02.000 | trying to figure out how they can have a career

01:50:04.400 | they can be proud of, or maybe a life they can be proud of?

01:50:07.600 | - I feel like a life you can be proud of

01:50:10.320 | is just one if you leave something a little bit better.

01:50:12.320 | It doesn't have to be big.

01:50:15.040 | That's a life well-lived, right?

01:50:18.000 | It was Churchill who said,

01:50:19.200 | you might remember it better than I.

01:50:21.760 | You make a living by what you get,

01:50:24.400 | and you live a life by what you give.

01:50:26.880 | Something to that effect.

01:50:27.920 | But my advice would probably, when I'm asked this,

01:50:31.360 | I would tell them to ask more questions than give answers.

01:50:35.920 | Just focus on being a sponge.

01:50:40.800 | It's funny, I asked my husband the same question the other day.

01:50:44.080 | I said, hey, we're talking to somebody,

01:50:46.240 | and people were asking this,

01:50:48.160 | and he sort of paused for a while,

01:50:51.120 | and he said, I tell him, patience.

01:50:53.440 | I said, what do you mean?

01:50:54.240 | And he said, I see so many young people,

01:50:58.000 | like they're in such a hurry to somewhere, I don't know where.

01:51:00.240 | And that if they just had patience and let life unfold,

01:51:03.600 | I think they may be surprised where they ended up.

01:51:06.480 | And actually, I think that's a really good answer, to be honest.

01:51:11.120 | - Along the way, keep asking questions.

01:51:13.360 | Keep that childlike curiosity.

01:51:15.200 | - I know, it sounds so easy to say.

01:51:17.120 | It's just so, you know, it's--

01:51:19.840 | - Yeah, like you said, the obvious things.

01:51:22.560 | - Yeah.

01:51:23.120 | - I think they tend to be the most profound.

01:51:25.680 | Jeannie, you're an incredible human being.

01:51:27.200 | You're an inspiration to so many.

01:51:28.720 | Thank you for helping run and contribute

01:51:33.760 | to one of the great companies

01:51:34.960 | that brings so much good power to the world.

01:51:37.120 | And thank you for putting in the hard work

01:51:39.920 | of putting it all in the great book.

01:51:41.520 | So, and thank you for talking today.

01:51:43.040 | This is a huge honor.

01:51:44.000 | Thank you for doing it.

01:51:44.640 | - Yeah, you did a lovely job.

01:51:45.760 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeannie Rometty.

01:51:49.440 | To support this podcast,

01:51:50.640 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

01:51:52.800 | And now let me leave you with some words

01:51:55.360 | from Eleanor Roosevelt.

01:51:56.640 | "Do what you feel in your heart to be right,

01:51:59.440 | for you'll be criticized either way."

01:52:02.480 | Thank you for listening.

01:52:04.640 | I hope to see you next time.

01:52:06.880 | (upbeat music)

01:52:09.460 | (upbeat music)

01:52:12.040 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity | Lex Fridman Podcast #362

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