On October 24th, 2011, Ginny Rometty was absorbed in work at her office, when she received a call from Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, that the board had voted to appoint her as the ninth CEO and that she would take over from him in two month’s time. It took Ginni a whole day and an evening with her husband to let the matter sink in. It was an incredible moment for Ginni and a momentous decision for the iconic company. Ginni would be the first woman to steward IBM as its Chief executive officer, and she would have to take over the reins of the company during a critical and transitional stage in its long and memorable history. IBM had turned hundred years old and was fast becoming irrelevant in the industry. There was work to be done to revive( perhaps resuscitate may be a better word) the vitals of the company and energize it back into action. Ginni was asked to step into turbid waters. Before she retired from IBM in December 2020, she had steered the company towards reinventing itself, leaving it stronger, more contemporary, and poised to grow. Ginni led IBM through some of its worst times. For straight twenty-four quarters, IBM had declared losses; but Ginni’s focus during her tenure wasn’t money or Earnings per share. She unequivocally realized that IBM had to change course, not a slight turn here and there, but literally a huge swerve back to the IT highway. Living quarter to quarter wouldn’t bring about the kind of change that will establish IBM to thrive for the next hundred years. It was not going to be easy either, for a 300,000-strong company with entrenched structures and a way of working to change and transform itself. But Ginni was determined to plan and execute the transition. She changed what needed to be changed, and refocused the company on a new set of priorities. People and skills orientation became her mantra, and in eight years she masterminded a radical shift in bridging the gap between skills and roles, along with business strategy. IBM under Ginni reprised its role for the modern age.
Ginni’s own career trajectory within the company for over four decades is spectacular and legendary, but behind her phenomenal growth and rise in the corporate world, lay a life full of hurdles, continuous learning, hard work, tremendous resilience, commitment, and a single-minded focus to embrace problems at each stage and meet it headlong. It was a purposeful life, an American dream come true. It was a saga of a woman who rose to a global stage by sheer self-determination and resilience. I was looking forward to Ginni’s memoir. When Indira Nooyi’s autobiography came out a year ago, I read it in one go; and now, Ginni’s reminiscence “The good power” co-written with Joanne Gordon, released last week was hard to put down as well. I read it non-stop for over five hours, only stopping briefly to make notes for this essay. It was an inspiring read.
There are two events that stand out in Ginni’s younger days, which have left a deep mark and shaped her life and work. The first was a devastating personal event. Ginni was sixteen when she happened to walk into the garage of her home a day before thanksgiving to hear her father (Nick) announce to her mother ( Arlene) that he was leaving her for good. Ginni recollects with clarity in her memoir the exact words her father uttered when her mom pleaded for help to take care of her four children: “ I’ii never give you anything. For all I care, you can go work on the street”. With these words, her father walked out of their lives leaving them nothing to hold on to. Her mom had no education beyond high school, didn’t have a job, and there were five mouths to feed. It was an existential crisis for everyone, and that is when Ginni saw her Mom do something incredible. Arlene decided to attend community college to pick up skills that could land her a decent job. For a woman who hadn’t read a book in a long time, or considered going back to school in her wildest dreams, this was a life-changing decision that couldn’t have come easily, but Arlene realized that without skills she could never lift her family out of the financial hole they found themselves in. She started attending classes on basic computer skills and accounting, landed herself a decent job that slowly expanded her social horizons, and held the family together. While Ginni’s siblings were too young to understand the determination and courage of her Mom’s decision to educate herself, Ginni was old enough to absorb the first great transformative lesson of her life – the value of resilience, learning, and acquisition of relevant skills, no matter how old you are or what you do or how you are placed. During her leadership years at IBM, she would, again and again, emphasize, orchestrate and put in place programs and initiatives that expanded access to learning programs and helped people skill. More on this later in this essay.
The second event happened in 1975 during Ginni’s first year at Northwestern college. At that time Northwestern had a policy of making it affordable for students who had a good aptitude. The total fees she had to pay was $6500 a year, which was made manageable through generous contributions from family and scholarships. Her intention was to become a doctor, but she soon found out that biology wasn’t’ as interesting as Engineering, problem-solving, and systems thinking were to her. She transferred to engineering. Towards the end of the first year, despite internships and summer jobs, she had no money for anything else other than the bare necessities to survive in the dorm. In the last two weeks of her freshman year, Ginni vividly remembers, she was left with only twenty-five cents, which she deliberately placed in a clear plastic container and stared at that coin with the realization that this was it! no more money, and the end of everything she ever wanted to be. Such moments are often transformational in one way or the other – the human will is either broken or energized. And If one can get through such moments with clarity of purpose and the realization that from here onwards, the situation can only improve and cannot get worse, then more often than not, life gets better. Ginni remained undaunted and struck to her purpose of graduating well and getting a job. Those days of financial hardships only sharpened her determination and brought forth that fierce streak of tenacity and resilience that would later become her hallmark. She knew from her mother’s experience that education is going to make a difference in her life as well, and this clarity helped pull her through those grim days. Mathematics came naturally to her, and that segued into computer science. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were writing software for the first microcomputers during the same year Ginni joined college, and Microsoft was in the first year of its operation. Dramatic changes were in the wings, and Ginni, unknowing of her destiny, was preparing herself to play a pioneering role in an industry that would transform society.
Ginni’s memoir is broadly divided into three parts: “Me”, “We” and “Us”. This division is not an arbitrary demarcation for the sake of the book but it goes deeper than that. It defines the progression of a man’s life. As an individual, we begin life with the “me” always. Our formative years are all about the “I” only. This is an absolutely necessary phase of one’s growth. Altruism is not for the young, they have to be selfish and develop their personalities. Until the core personality is well developed, no other expansion of the psyche is possible. When a weak bespectacled young boy approached Swami Vivekananda, the great religious evangelist of India, asking if he could learn the scriptures, the Swami gave him one long hard look and ordered him to play football and build his muscles first, before stepping into the finer world of thoughts and ideas. Once the “I” is well established, and the contours of one’s personality are clear, well drawn, and focused, then the “I” can slowly expand and mature to embrace others within one’s orbit – the “we”. Over time, as maturity widens and deepens the “we” transforms into the “us”. At this stage, a hero or the leader acts and thinks on behalf of the whole society. A CEO of a large company has to navigate these stages in order to be a successful leader. The stranglehold of the ‘I’ gives way to ‘we’, and then to ‘us’. In Joseph Campbell’s brilliant work “The Hero with a thousand faces”, he sketches the trajectory of a mythical hero in these terms as well – individuation, followed by expansion of the psyche, and then a universal appeal. So the structure of Ginni’s memoir echoes the basic principles of human potential and growth.
When Ginni joined IBM in early 1981, after a brief stint at General Motors, IBM was the market leader in computer solutions, though the monopoly was gradually diminishing in scope. Mainframes still ruled the world, and Ginni writes elegantly about her early experiences understanding and working with these huge machines with layers of wiring and reams of documentation. She explains how she would be the only woman in the team laying down the thick mainframe cables under the floors when the men in her team went to the local bars for a break. She didn’t mind that she was left out, because she was learning and doing things, and the men respected her for that. She remembers her first major assignment at the Grand trunk western Railroad and the weekends spent at the office accompanied by her husband Mark, crunching the geospatial locations of trains into the software for a demonstration the next day. Even in those early days, Ginni’s firmly believed that customers need to see the software working for them, and therefore it was important to show clients how the software worked with their own data. Such customer-centricity gained Ginni a reputation for excellence in execution. In 1985, she got her first promotion as an IBM manager for a specific region to sell and install the huge IBM 3820 printers, and she got to lead a team for the first time – the beginning of her stint as leader. She remembers with gratitude all those who helped her during those formative days. She tells about Pat O Brien, her manager, who gave the valuable advice that the primary duty of a leader is to facilitate and develop the careers of their team members. If that focus is present, he told her, productivity and loyalty will automatically accrue. A piece of wisdom that Ginni took to heart. Working with different managers in different contexts gave her the breadth of experience needed to grow in the organization, but she always knew at heart that her real depth lay in her understanding of systems and how to break system apart and put it back to work. A T-shaped professional is what she saw herself evolving into – a breadth of experience and depth of expertise that can be applied across the spectrum of work.
There are several brilliant insights throughout the book. Let me point out a couple of them I liked. In one stirring paragraph, Ginni defines who a professional is. I lingered on the para for a while because I thought it distilled the essence of this much-abused term in the corporate world. “Be a professional”, we are often told. But what does it mean? Ginni clarifies that a professional is one who is prepared for the assignment, keeps others informed so they are never surprised, is always on time, is responsive, has a positive attitude under stress, and anticipates problems even before they begin to manifest. This is as good a working definition of professionalism as you will ever find in any management book. The other key idea that Ginni elaborates on throughout her memoir is the difference between “serving a customer” versus “servicing a customer”. Serving a customer is transactional, and does not build long-term relationships; on the other hand, servicing a client means ensuring the client is satisfied and the need is more than met. A waiter serving a table at the restaurant can serve food with proficiency bringing dish after dish to the table, but the same waiter services the patron by ensuring they are happy with the food and the overall culinary experience. Ginni makes the important, but often under-realized truth that people often only remember how they felt after an encounter, and not what was said or done during an engagement. The overall feeling of satisfaction and pleasantness is what matters most. If clients felt good about a service-based relationship, they will stick even if a few transactions go wrong; else, they will shop for alternatives at the first opportunity.
In 1992, IBM ventured into new waters. It started its consulting business. Throughout its history IBM always has sold packaged solutions- both hardware and software; however in the nineties with the IT landscape changing, and customers beginning to seek customized solutions to specific IT problems, IBM decided to spin off a consulting division to understand, analyze and advise clients on the best course of action. The role of consulting demanded a completely different mindset. IBMers were unused to it. They were good at selling and installing their solutions, but consulting required them a take a step back and work actively with the client to arrive at insights into how to solve given problems. Ginni was moved from sales to consulting, a whole new learning curve altogether. She writes eloquently in the memoir about how she had to learn a lot of new skills to fit into consulting shoes – thorough preparation and communication, being the top skills among many. She notes how winning consulting deals is not easy. One could spend weeks preparing and presenting to prospective clients, but unless the message and its articulation come together precisely at the time it needs to, the deal can quickly slip through the fingers. Meticulous preparation, she says, is the key, which again ties back to curiosity, learning, and skills. In the years that followed, Ginni rose up the ranks in the consulting division, and by the end of the decade, she was made the head of the division. The crown jewel of her achievement in the consulting space was the acquisition of Price waters and cooper’s consulting wing in 2002, a deal that changed the face of IBM’s presence in the field. The integration of PwC’s employees, their culture, and working style was one of the biggest challenges of Ginni’s career; but she masterminded it well. Ginni devotes several pages in her memoir to describe the process, the intense negotiations, the human fears, and people management skills that were severely tested during the deal, and when it came through, she describes the sense of relief and overwhelming responsibility that followed. Ginni’s singular role in the PwC deal put her name on the top of the list for the next level of leadership as the CEO of the IBM in 2011. The IBM board didn’t fail to notice her enormous potential and talent.
When Ginni walked into IBM’s Yorktown office in New York on January 3rd, 2012 at 7 AM to broadcast live to IBMers all around the world for the first time, it was the apotheosis of a personal and professional journey that began decades ago when her family was left alone to fend for survival. Ginni knew she was not stepping on a bed of roses. IBM had a lot of catching up to do. Newer players like Google and Amazon were playing a dominant role in the industry and redefined the way it worked, and IBM on the other hand was losing big time in every department. Ginni knew that IBM possessed the talent, but she had to somehow break the ceiling and emerge anew. AI was the first item on her list. IBM showcased the power of AI to the world in 1996 by building deep blue, a chess-playing machine, to beat reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov, and then again in 2011, by creating Watson, another AI machine that outplayed the then Jeopardy champions through an incredible demonstration of natural language skills; but, that was not enough, it was time for IBM to implement and monetize the AI research done so far and forge new pathways. IBM had to evolve concrete business AI use cases, and Ginni was committed to taking Watson to Healthcare, a socially important domain, and at the same time, a lucrative one too. And then item to be tackled is IBM’s presence in the Cloud space, IBM had to evolve its own version or flavor of cloud offerings. It had none when Ginni took control. While Mainframes, IBM’s huge processing machines, still ran some of the critical functions of large clients, it was impossible to ignore the cloud-based infrastructure that would make it possible for IBM to play a significant role in the digital transformation happening all around. IBM was woefully out of step in that journey. In 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat, a big technical acquisition, and positioned itself to become a strong contender in the cloud market.
One of the crucial corrective actions that Ginni had to undertake was to set right the skill gap in IBM and fill up the roles that required a variety of technical skills, especially in areas such as cyber security. Learning, skilling, and innovation – formed the three pillars of Ginni’s approach to anything she did. She initiated a mandatory four-hour training for everyone in the organization each Friday including herself, and for four consecutive years, Ginni taught the first hour of the class. She loved learning, and teaching came naturally to her. As far as bridging the skill gap in IBM, One of Ginni’s fundamental insights was it wasn’t necessary to have college degrees or the usual four-year credentialing to be able to perform a majority of job roles in the digital industry today. Ginni extended the SkillsFirst paradigm ( known as P-Tech )designed by IBM at a school in Brooklyn, which took in people who had the curiosity to learn and nothing more and offered them an associate degree along with a High school education. The training was given on contemporary skills followed by relevant internships and apprenticeships. No prerequisites were demanded of these candidates and no financial obligations whatsoever, except the willingness to learn. Ginni galvanized the SkillsFirst movement into a huge tidal wave within IBM that resulted in the rewriting of almost all the tech jobs within the company on the basis of skills only, and not on degrees or any other form of formal credentialing. Ginni coined a new term to refer to this new breed of employees – “New collared”, people who were neither white nor blue collared, these were the new-age professionals who possessed the right skills for the right jobs in an increasingly digital world. Ginni was prescient enough to realize that formal college degrees, though an absolute must for certain kind of work and activity, is not a necessity for all type of roles. The mismatch between the demand and supply of skills can be fixed if we can get off our traditional mindsets and look at job roles and skills through a different lens. There are millions who can get skilled without needing a college degree, and this overarching vision became her credo and work even after retirement, when she, along with other like-minded CEO’s started the OneTen movement ( creating one million jobs for Black Americans within ten years). This initiative was triggered by the Black lives Movement after the tragic death of George Floyd.
Ginni Rometty’s memoir strikes the right balance between the personal and the professional. There is humility in her writing, and gratitude to all those who have stood by her all these years, especially, her husband Mark Rometty, whose name she mentions countless times in the book. The couple chose not to have children of their own, and each respected the other’s ambitions, attitudes, work, passion, and acccomdated the prolonged absence from each other. Ginni admits that her success wouldn’t have been as steady and progressive without Mark’s presence in her life. Ginni’s siblings have all done well for themselves, and Ginni is the big mother bear for all of them. Ginni does not dwell much on gender issues she faced or how she was perceived at the workplace. She does refer to a few occasions when her gender and not her work stood out as the elephant in the room, but for the most part in the memor, the focus is on her work and the outcomes speak for themselves. In fact, the very realization that she could be a role model for others occurred to her after a talk in Australia around 2000, when a father walked up to the stage and said “ I wish my daughter grows up to be like you”. At that moment, it struck Ginni that her actions and public role could be an inspiration for young girls. Until then, she says she never perceived herself to be a role model for women. We believe her.
Like Indra Nooyi of Pepsico and other outstanding women CEOs of the modern era, what struck me, as I finished reading Ginni’s reminiscence is that success is not defined by numbers alone, but by the quality of work done and the change, these leaders have effected in the environments they worked in. Looking at Ginni’s tenure only through the lens of the quarterly results may not do justice to her work and vision. At the core of Ginni’s life and worth ethic are deep integrity, steadfastness of purpose, and a profound sense of human possibilities, not just for IBMers alone, but for human society as a whole. Her outspoken view of the power of AI and how it should be regulated, and stewarded for the good of all stands truer than ever today. And so are her views on education. Having witnessed first-hand the invaluable power of learning, she emphasized continuous education for everyone, at all levels, and at every stage. She continues the good work after retirement. The OneTen initiative to skill people for the digital era has a lot of traction in the corporate world, and it is Ginni’s vision that such initiatives are not restricted to just one community or people, but to all who have the curiosity and drive to learn. That is a noble goal.
I recommend Ginni’s memoir to every professional out there. It is worth reading and rereading.
“Whatever changes you seek – for your life, your work, or our world – you’re going to be uncomfortable at times, but don’t let that stop you. Go for it now. “
Thought provoking.
Thanks Jaya
Great essay…wonderful read Bala. Must pick up the book and read it.
Thanks Renu.