Ginni Rometty Quotes

You can engineer change.

We should prepare our future workforce differently. It isn’t just advanced STEM degrees. There are many jobs you can do without advanced degrees.

I’m the kid that tried to take Latin in school because I felt if I could understand the root of everything, then I could understand why it worked. That was what took me into engineering. And the reason I stayed is, engineering teaches you to solve problems. It teaches you to think.

You’ve got to keep reinventing. You’ll have new competitors. You’ll have new customers all around you.

It will not be a world of man versus machine. It will be a world of man plus machines.

You will have many more goals in the years ahead. But do not confuse a goal with a purpose.

When you remove layers, simplicity and speed happen.

It’s easy to have an act one and two. Go ahead and have an act three, four, and five. The saying is the easy part. The doing is the hard part.

I am very practical.

Clients say, ‘What’s your strategy,’ and I say, ‘Ask me what I believe first.’ That’s a far more enduring answer.

I’ve been head of strategy at IBM and together with my colleagues built our five-year plan. My priorities are going to be to continue to execute on that.

You build your own strategy. You don’t define it by what another competitor is doing.

Everyone talks about how much data‘s in the world. Except, actually, 80% of it is pretty blind to computers. I mean, it can store it. But if it’s a movie, a poem, a song, it doesn’t know what it’s actually saying or doing.

Growth and comfort do not coexist.

You define yourself by either what your clients want or what you believe they’ll need for the future. So: Define yourself by your client, not your competitor.

The ultimate competitive advantage is being cognitive.

Don’t protect your past. Don’t protect your products.

I think health care is absolutely ripe. It’s an $8 trillion industry, lots of inefficiency in it.

I’ve made lots of mistakes. Probably the worst one – I would say they tie. It’s either when I didn’t move fast enough on something, or I didn’t take a big enough risk.

I ask everyone‘s opinion when they don’t speak up. And then when they have an opinion, I’ll ask others to talk about it.

This century, the 21st century, will be the Indian century – and I really believe that.

I always say, you know, if I sit here and close my eyes and say, ‘When did I learn the most in my life, in my career?’ It’ll always be when I close them and everything I think of is when I took a risk. It’s when I think I learned the most.

Think about when a digital business marries up with what I’ll call ‘digital intelligence.’ It is the dawn of a new era about being a ‘cognitive’ business. When every product, every service, how you run your company can actually have a piece that learns and thinks as part of it, you will be a cognitive business.

Today when I think about diversity, I actually think about the word ‘inclusion.’ And I think this is a time of great inclusion. It’s not men, it’s not women alone. Whether it’s geographic, it’s approach, it’s your style, it’s your way of learning, the way you want to contribute, it’s your age – it is really broad.

If you ask me, ‘So what is your business model?’ Our business model‘s always about shifting to higher value opportunities.

I think, given who the IBM target company is, I feel our purpose is to be essential to our clients.

IBM’s long-standing mantra is ‘Think.’ What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.

So what it means is when you don’t believe in the inevitable, it means you don’t expect that that’s how things have to turn out. You can change them.

I think ‘Actions speak louder than words‘ is one thing, I think, I always took from my mom. And to this day, I think about that in everything I do.

Work on something that matters. Have courage.

I was always surrounded by people that wanted to mentor you.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That’s all it is; culture is people’s behaviors.

I’ve got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that’s part of the value that IBM brings.

Above and beyond, not only are we an innovation company, we are in service of our clients.

The social network will be the new production line.

Artificial intelligence is one of 50 things that Watson does. There is also machine learning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and different analytical engines – they’re like little Lego bricks. You can put intelligence in any product or any process you have.

As I tell all our folks, the only reason we exist – make no mistake – is our clients.

No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.

When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.

I learned to always take on things I’d never done before.

Steward for the long term. It’s not always easy, but you do it.

I’m the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

I have a great job at a great company.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

One of the most important topics I think for us all to work on is job creation.

This idea of ‘New Collar‘ says for the jobs of the future here, there are many in technology that can be done without a four-year college degree and, therefore, ‘New Collar’ not ‘Blue Collar,’ ‘White Collar.’ It’s ‘New Collar.’

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.