Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO, IBM

[Music] so our special guest is Ginni Rometty who is as I said the chairman and CEO of IBM it's a position she assumed initially as the CEO in January 1 of 2012 and also became the chairman and in october 1 of 2012 and now it's chairman and CEO IBM is obviously a company everybody's familiar with it's a company whose roots go back to let's say 1911 took the name IBM or International Business Machines in 1924 it's a company with the market capitalization about a hundred and sixty billion dollars and has revenue of about a hundred billion dollars earns about sixty and a half billion dollars in net income and has 431 thousand employees which is the fourth largest private employer in the United States Ginni went to grew up in Chicago and I went to Northwestern where she was an intern engineering and computer sciences initially joined General Motors and then two years later 1981 she joined in Detroit IBM as a systems engineer and then she joined later and really started in in the 1991 the consulting business of IBM and ultimately led its acquisition of the PwC consulting business which later became IBM services and later she became in 2009 the senior vice president for sales marketing and strategy for IBM and then of course in 2012 took the position she currently has obviously running IBM as a very much a full-time job but Jennie does do some other things on the outside she's a member of the Board of Trustees of her alma mater Northwestern and also on the board of sloan-kettering among other things that she does so Ginny thank you very much for coming this morning so this is my life in a really ok so let me just start by asking you this today there are I think about 24 women who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and there are three women who are members of Augusta which took more work to get into what was harder to get into the CEO or I actually could you just I worked a lifetime to become the CEO of IBM okay and Augusta so recently you were on the cover of Fortune magazine and the cover said can I BM ever be cool and is it your goal to make IBM cool and is it cool yeah well I think you know this is a for those not that anyone would have seen that always but I got a lot of notes from folks inside who said we are cool and I think it depends how you define cool so if you think running 90% of the banks in the world 80% of the airline's 60% of all the transactions and business is cool then we're cool and I think if you think changing the face of healthcare is cool then we're cool reinventing education we're cool and I saw a great statistic that I think most people wouldn't guess we had a couple thousand internships this past summer time and I saw that there were 1 million applicants for them so to me that says you're cool and the best way to get one of those internships are the call you directly or are you are you applying Oh some children so in other words what you're saying is you know you often read that people like young kids coming out of very good schools want to go to Google or Facebook or similar companies iBM is competitive with them you know this is a another not just internships I happen to because I look at those stats every every month as an example again our consulting business which is largest in the world every kid we hired turn down three other job offers to come to us so I think that that says that says a lot so today to find for us what IBM really is because you do hardware people have an image of IBM that they make these large mainframe computers but you do many other things but you consider yourselves a hardware company a software company a services company or ask you a question first I mean let me ask you because it's a so what you might know the answer though David cuz you're very well schooled on us but what percentage would you guess of our company is hardware well I assume it's going to be a smaller percentage than so there's a very important part of hardware that we do but in fact actually it's been an interesting year but as the year closes and we go into next year hardware will be less than 10% of the IBM Kundalini and I think people have a vision and it's almost I think it's symbolic of what is IBM's hallmark which is about continuously reinventing itself to what is the next most higher value thing and so if you just look at the number across the top it isn't as if it's still a hundred billion of the same things anymore and to me this is really important and that's why I think most people hardware is a very important thing very important in what we've done is focused on the kind of hardware which by the way you know runs all those banks and Airlines and everything that is the most secure that highest throughput most reliable etc but it is now less than 10% and in fact the company has morphed over this time 30% software services and if you ask me you know well what is IBM today I would tell you and this is an important word it's an enterprise solutions company because there are consumer companies out there and I think it's important to know what you are we are an enterprise company that sells to enterprises and they serve the consumer so you do have four hundred thirty one thousand employees that's a lot of employees to be responsible for one of your competitors HP decided they were going to hive off one of their businesses would you consider you know splitting all part of the company because it's just so big or your that isn't something you would consider you know you know what it isn't about size it's about the value you provide right and again back to this thought this one notion which I think in many ways is underappreciated this the idea that you constantly move your portfolio to higher value so you know you and I were talking earlier I think one of the things I've worked for some great people in this company and one of the things they taught me was you always steward for the long term and if you steward for the long term that means that you adjust the portfolio constantly and so I would say we already we take care of any portfolio we do it on a continuous basis and so we would over the last decade we've add 150 companies and over the last my tenure actually even just this year I will have divested of seven billion dollars of revenue for IBM that lost a half a billion dollars so it's that constant we constantly prune and change at portfolio on our own and I think that that's our job as stewarding the company and returning high value to our shareholders so one of the leaders that you work for is somebody that I know well Lou Gerstner so what was that like he's an easy guy to work for is that right yeah absolutely absolutely I look I I in all seriousness I've had the great pleasure because I worked under Lou and understand both right and I always say what I've learned in my tenure my you know a couple decades now at IBM I said learned don't protect your past don't define yourself as a product and you always steward this company for the long term and you know that if you keep those three things in your mind you will take great comfort and many of the decisions you make regardless of what people think about them and I learned many of those from them so you went to Northwestern at the time did you ever think you would want to join IBM or be attackin large computer company or Enterprise Services company and what did you think you were gonna do when you graduate college you actually went to work for General Motors and actually and that's I think as this is something I tell so many of our young people and that you mentioned I'm an engineer I am a big believer that in the next I think decade in America every student is going to have to have some kind of stem background right science technology engineering math something like that for America to be competitive and when I went into it back then and back then there were many times I would have been the only woman in a class you know I'll often meet colleagues that'll say you know don't you remember me we sat next to each other and I'm like hmm I don't and they're like well there was one of you and many of us and so I in that timeframe there were not many women in engineering at all and people say well why did you go into engineering in in my really strong advice for anyone and and my niece is my nephew's it's all about I think what it taught me was how to solve problems that's it and I if you you don't have to be a practicing engineer even the idea that engineering does that is teach it teaches you how to problem-solve which I'll get to your question then of how did I end up where this was but this problem solving to me then kind of prepares you to do anything and that's why when I first went to General Motors GM was a great company and I they had had a program at that time don't have it now but it was they had had scholarships for folks to get women into engineering and had gone to some of the top schools and no strings attached I mean they did a great job helping me through northwestern and so I worked there a few years but the answer that question is what I really wanted to do was apply technology and I could do it in many industries at IBM we have many careers but when you joined IBM surely you didn't think in those days that you could rise up to be the CEO of course not no but you know what I I certainly came from my mom Reese raised me and my brothers and sisters we came from a single mom I mean she taught us all we could be whatever we wanted to be be and you could do and don't even think about it that way so I think like many people who are successful in this room it wasn't about you know one day I'm going to do this it was everything you did you just thought about how well you could do it and then you did the next thing but do you think women to rise up have to be twice as smart and work twice as hard as men or just 50% well I think everybody works hard I do I think the the biggest recommendation that I give to it's actually too many young women but I think it applies to everyone I was just giving it to my nephew this past weekend in college I told him you know growth and comfort never coexist and you have to get used to that thought because whether you are a person a company or a country if you're gonna grow you are gonna have to do things that put you at risk and so that's to me the biggest advice I would give anyone about moving forward man-woman doesn't matter is that thought so by the way people must ask you all the time what devices do you use I'm a new year head of a large technology company do you and smart what is your smartphone what is your I have all around yeah yeah I do and this is this is why these guys are all growing this is a I do I do it and of course we have I have my share of Apple devices we have a great partnership with Apple as well and they talk about so I think I find like many of you I use different devices for different things so let's talk about Apple for a moment um IBM was a company that maybe did a lot of things on its own and since you've come in you've had a lot of partnerships with a lot of companies let's talk about Apple um people were probably surprised that you are now selling iPads to your corporate customers is that more or less right yeah although that's a very tiny piece of it is that the iPad but can I back up just one second to give it context and then I think it's a really great symbolic an important partnership back up to this idea that we're constantly changing so as I said to IBM a solution company so as a solution company right now there are a couple big shifts in the industry they're transforming my industry and I would challenge everybody in here they're transforming yours and if you think they're not you're missing something they're gonna reorder every industry including my own and the shifts are around that the word you hear the buzz words you hear all the time around the data around cloud and around social and mobile for us it's a strategy that I'll then lead to where are the Apple fits in this but the strategy for us is we believe when it comes to business that all that big data is going to end up being I call it a natural resource it'll be the basis of competition I know we work with many of you actually I know the companies that it will be what separates winners and losers how you do predictive analytics and how you use it we have big businesses in fact last year sixteen billion dollars around that big transformation around data big transformation around the cloud which is to help enterprises move into the era of cloud we're rated the number one cloud provider by IDC we can come back to that and then number three is social mobile insecurity I want to add the word security changes the way people engage and the reason I want to tell you those three strategies it leads now to these partnerships because if you're a solution company you don't do everything by yourself and be if you've never defined yourself as a product you're always focused on what is the solution you create so with the partnership with Apple is one of now for would I consider sort of very strategic partnerships that are all around IBM is an enterprise platform for that future I just described so with Apple really if I can kind of boil it down the view was together we could reimagine how work was done most people who if you have your device's when it comes to doing serious business in your company statistics our sixty percent use it for email and calendaring 70 percent are afraid to do things wave more sophisticated in real work process because of security so we knew there was an itch week I'll talk about some of the apps coming out so the partnership with Apple was to reimagine work then we announced a partnership with Twitter which was really kind of the view that every decision you make every business decision could be improved at the voice of the consumer and so we'll be taking all that in to come into business decision-making which is very hard to do just with all that data sitting out there as it is and then in cloud 2 partnerships both si P and 10 cent in China which as you know 10 cent is huge in China and we are the cloud selected partner to take to small medium business so these are all about providing a certain solution which do you call up Tim Cook and say we want to do a partnership or does he call you have it yeah CEO of IBM calls people usually listen I somebody you know know we've we've Tim and I've gotten to know each other I was talking to have a Tim Tim I worked for IBM for 12 years early in his career and we've got to know each other through some other things and and the more we talked the two companies are extremely complementary and I think what's been most in you know I think to both of our pleasure has been to watch the sets of engineers with great respect for each other both realizing they know something different and Apple certainly I think many people would say a gold standard for consumed ability usability ease and we on the other side all around okay now we're not only gonna make that secure that application has to do real work and therefore it's got to connect into all these systems of the world so my perfect kind of example I just saw there'll be a dozen coming out in about a week here of the first day apps with partners and one of my favorite ones that I think is so illustrious over this partnership is there's the one for the flight attendant that so if you go on if you're on a plane and you're gonna have a connection and your connection you know you're gonna be late it's delayed what happens to most people what do you do you're up in the air and you know you're gonna miss your connection what do you do scream scream okay that would be that would be you okay what else others the kinder gentler no you asked that yeah they tell you you're late and then what do you do okay so and then when you get off the plane what you do you you run to the yeah see I to sign and that someone does this for about 15 minutes and then and then while you're waiting in line you're calling and booking duplicate reservations and all sorts of things and so the first app which is one of the apps for reflection I just think why can't someone come up to you on the plane and say really mr. David look you know one of our top flyers here's your two choices pick it hit the button and I've sent your boarding pass to your phone and you're all set for when we land right that would be nice is that going to happen yeah that's gonna it's okay for you but technically to think about what's required you might think that's easy but the technicality of what's required the certain kind of satellite you can use up in the air to be sure that that could be done and then all the connections into those systems yet you can't have a flight attendant doing this for it's got to be two buttons to get this done so to me it's a it's one of the great examples weird I was just with one of the big telcos and it's a field utility app for their folks out in the field there's a whole set of em coming and that's that's to me reimagining work with the combination of the two companies I'm talk about cloud computing IBM famously build used to build these big machines and then I still do and still do but you also have people who help you figure out how to use the machines now cloud computing is something that maybe we'll obsolete some of that or not look I know clouds still do run out hardware do they they actually have to run somewhere I have to buy the hardware no that's right that's right and so it's whether you share it whether you use it so right here's for everybody who thinks about we you know my simple definition of cloud I think which is helpful is that it's any it's any IT or process that runs as a service that's what it is and if you're a company again what's happening right now actually new applications being built 90% are being built in the cloud and 70% the companies are doing something hybrid which I'll come back and describe now why so you said why why would people go the biggest thing all these things have a business reason to me and the business reason is it does offer you agility and speed and for many things you do that is what you need and so what you will find most people when we say 90% is building if you're building something net new you're building it out in a cloud technology it's because yes fast and you'll find customer-facing typically a lot of customer facing things people are building building there and then you'll find they often and there's a great similarity to the way the internet evolved because when the internet some people would remember came to be you might remember words like browser Wars and Counting eyeballs and how many things people looked at and then someone said you know and that's someone you know said you know people are gonna want to do very serious business things and that was the birth of e-business and that was certainly one of Lou Gerstner x' greatest contributions to IBM was around a business and the idea was instead of just looking I'm gonna want to connect that back to the things I already have so I can buy do manufacturing supply chain pricing demand fulfillment and that birthed a whole industry for IBM by the way called middleware now you come to cloud if you're a company most companies when they look at cloud they're doing three things they're saying some things I'm gonna do on my premise and that's a private cloud some I'm gonna do it you said externally a public cloud and then I to connect the two together that's hybrid so the world of cloud is those three things people will do it to become more agile and and it is a it is a good thing so in some ways you'll do new things some things will get replaced and in the end the picture is gonna be that whole picture to get into cloud and to get it's more aggressively involved in it you bought that soft layer mm-hm and do you feel that you had to buy something because you weren't yet ready to be that was a good question because actually we've done in in cloud we've done 17 acquisitions in total in big data analytics we've done by maybe over maybe almost 35 right now and what that kind of the reason I set up when you hear a lot of discussion about cloud IBM had done a lot of work in private cloud hybrid how to connect and what software was with a public cloud so it was a missing of the three pieces it was a missing piece and that's what we chose to go by and and they were the largest private we held in your world privately held cloud highly successful they run many I can't remember now I don't know 20 30 40 thousand startups they many of the companies who you would know you know we run a little company almost I can't remember what percentage of apps on your phone are actually running on that so how do you instill an entrepreneurial culture and a company that's as big as yours because a lot of these new technology developments come from small companies but you're a big ones how do you get entrepreneurs to thrive in your atmosphere well you know this is I think for everybody in the room this topic about agility and speed and a company you know if they if there's a silver bullet that's if you ever want to have one that's what it is and how you do it is you provide you know many people call it an agile working I was just a big a big a big bank let's just say a week ago talking about all they're a jille teams around the world right and what they were doing for to increase that sort of way things are done because we're all in this world where you want to build things test them modify this agile technology calls a DevOps world and that's how you set the team's up and it's in fact part why in some cases David I went ahead and this year watson we set up a brand new division right we haven't done a brand new division in probably 20 years set up a brand new division and entrepreneurial that's one way to do it is give something you know it's all of its own pieces let it go so I've integrated some units to do that the other is by via practices this idea of agile and DevOps and how you let people operate let's talk about Watson why did you name it Watson not Gerstner [Laughter] it is built on decades okay decades of technology for those who may not know Watson is a let's say a computer was a computer that went on Jeopardy I guess and beat whoever the best Jeopardy person was right but how did you take that computer that beat somebody on Jeopardy and make it into a whole business and what is Watson actually do this is this is to me one of the important most important things maybe in the morning I'll talk about that I want to back up a second what we did with Watson in 2011 it's by the way a cloud service by the way now that was just very symbolic what it actually is it's the very first really instantiation of something the world calls cognitive computing so if you go back in time the very first in the whole era of computing were machines that just counted things tabulating abacuses and they moved up from there they counted the next everything you know today is programmable you must tell it what to do somebody's told it what to do it's programmable everything big little doesn't matter this is the first genre of machines that they learn and so what Watson actually you don't Watson people say oh is it a big super search engine is it a Q&A does it look things up no it learns and so it actually has a learning curve like a hue it has a learning curve so what does it mean by it learns it it operates like our brain does you ingest it ingest lots of information which we will come back and talk about you know what it's done in healthcare and in cancer ingest a lot and then it learns over time what's right and wrong and makes correlations so like you and I make decisions it forms though hundreds of thousands of hypotheses at one time and then it goes it looks for all the data to prove them right or wrong and statistically over time that reasoning gets better and worse with data and it comes up with answers with percentage of confidence in the evidence of what it believes so it's not about just an answer and and this is really important in things like health care and that's what a learning machine does so just kind of picture that happening though at lightning speed all at one time and what we chose to do was show it first doing something pretty simple like jeopardy right I should say simple not really those two guys that were the winners they're like superhuman and their ability to answer questions and you know bring the little buzzer get in it's your brain is a fantastically as many of you know what it can operate on in low power it's able to operate on and so but what Watson had to do was open domain I mean he didn't get the questions ahead of time right so had to be able to and what you watched on TV said he would show his percent confidence and he'd only buzz in when he was certain confidence so that was years ago 2011 we have fast forward to now a whole different I mean we've set off in the commercialisation and now this is actually quite serious of what we've done and we took an approach that said first off could you transform an industry and I will I will always remember the first work we did in healthcare because I will always remember having met the first client we did the work with after we'd gotten some of the first work achieved and I thought to myself you know we are gonna really we are going to transform healthcare with this that this is going to transform healthcare as you and I know it and I will explain you're doing second right now not only it's known Kettering and we just rolled out to the largest private health facility in Southeast Asia where 1 million patients will be treated with the kind of protocols NSK has and so this idea that this machine we could transform healthcare so as an example it's been fed in the areas of oh let me let me just back up one second if you don't mind in health care Memorial sloan-kettering the Cancer Center has worked on the hard hard cancers like you know our tumor cancers like lung and the like MD Anderson started with leukemia Mayo Clinic helping use Watson to do clinical trial matching Cleveland Clinic to teach doctors and then to see if it could go broader so just what I just rattled off if you those of you in medicine the idea the five institutions like that would cooperate for long periods of time on this I think speaks everything you need to know about what the promises so what they have now gotten to the point is it's called the oncology advisor done with the best doctors in the world at msk and there are other great cancer centers of course but it is now to the point where understands can read medical records pulls all the pertinent data has been fed all of the information from every Journal of Medicine hundreds of textbooks every journal every edition twelve million pages of evidence and has been been trained by the world's best doctors now and as I said that's about to roll out for 1 million patients it's it's underway right now in Asia now you're taking the Watson group and putting them in a different kind of office setting in a different kind of very symbolically I would be like people in Silicon Valley is that right we very very symbolically chose the headquarters for Watson to be in Silicon Alley which is in in New York at 51 Astor and because not all good ideas come from one place in the world and so this is good we're very clear about then this kind of big building cut pops up in the middle lots of other startups and around it and that's where it's located and so in addition to health care I should say we have now gone on and Watson's ability to do advising and in fact you know Walter Isaacson writes about this and those of you who read the new book on the innovators there's a chapter on this that he he - you know uses Watson as the example it will redefine interaction between man and machine it will augment your in my decision-making it's not about replacement and so we've gone on with it as an adviser doing work and financial services and particularly doing work in some of the help center that kind of area then as well something called the discovery engine particularly in areas like Pharma so it's Sanofi Johnson & Johnson and its ability to discover relationships between things may end up being its killer app as well so it's commercializing across all the Watson won on Jeopardy who got the proceeds that we done we he did but we do made them to charity okay yes so today do you think women are coming into IBM and a higher percentage much higher than than when you joined and what are you doing to get women and other people from diverse backgrounds into IBM hmm this is a very good question because yes they are coming in at great percentages but I think there is a very important difference of how to look at diversity in these days if I go back years people would look at diversity and you would look at it by just different constituency groups right having different groups and you would call them out and then we kind of move forward in time and I think you think of diversity as inclusion I think a diversity differently now I think if it is about how do you engage a population no matter where they come from and this to me is a really important point that so whether it's women or doesn't matter you know really David whether it's women or whether it's you know people from different countries in Asia whoever it is our jobs are to get them to contribute to what they do at work and I this is a really interesting role I believe social and mobile particularly social technologies will play in a business setting this idea to get people to engage not just be a seat at a table they have to engage and what you see and the reason I launched off when you say is it about just women no it's about getting everyone to engage diverse population get them engaged and I look at the statistics and watch people's behavior when you get a group of people on a let's say my table here and we were all going to just talk across a table at each other certain people will engage in certain people won't I guarantee you if I put this same group of people then in a social setting a different set of people will engage it with social technologies then they will face-to-face and I do think this idea that social and mobile in a company can be a great production engine of the future that will both add speed and it will really drive this idea of engagement which is really a new death mission of diversity so looking a couple five years or ten years down the road what do you think computers will be doing or companies like yours will be doing what are the new devices will have or the new abilities we'll have to make ourselves little better oh look I this idea about big data analytics I think it will be with us in Watson this is not a one-year two-year this is decades here about what's going to happen and and that's why I so what will it be exactly I don't know but I do know I am absolutely convinced that this idea about augmenting our decision-making and really information being what separates winners and losers is going to continue to just grow and grow and grow that's cyber terrorism for a moment obviously to do cyber terrorism you need to have good computer skills and so forth are you confident that our skills in computers and things related to that in the United States are better than the other countries and do you think we are capable of defending ourselves against cyber terrorism I you know what I in I am I was just with a group of my own colleagues of 5060 of them and I gave a little 10 minute speech on security in cyber and this is this area is moving so fast I say to in my own colleagues whatever you do you're not doing you gotta keep doing more it's not enough because it is so sophisticated right I mean I'm one low-end last year half a billion personal records were stolen you know there's a complete underground that operates around this whole topic and then at the worst end nation-states and others that have other different motives in place so this this topic is one there are basics I kind of have kind of five basic things every company needs to do but in addition I think the most important thought about how to think about cyber cyber security any form of cyber is that I actually think of it as a big data and analytics problem because you and your mind have to get over and have a different paradigm about cyber security I think today people think about how do I protect things the analogy would be if you had a castle you put a moat around it or your own home you know you have an alarm system on every door and every window in fact in in if I look at most companies they even have a different alarm system on every door and window I mean this is not the best way to do it and because in real life the issue is already inside and so if you think about it most intrusions in a company they've been there eight months before they're discovered that is on average eight months before they're discovered so you almost have to switch your analogy and think of cyber and think of security as an analogy of your immune system in your body you have germs we all have germs in our body and what your immune system does is it just watches they don't become too dangerous and when they become dangerous your immune system goes to them and stops them and cuts it off that is the world of security we're gonna live in it's gonna all be about you know watching for tiny footprints in the sand long before and that's why it's a big data analytics that's why I think there's way more to be done in that area and that's the kind of thing that you have to do but one whole breath people still don't do the basics David this is what is sophisticated as the answer is on one end on the other end there are really basics for companies in your home that people still don't do that really they need to do and you know I know for us and our employees things like do you continuously I say you know raise the security IQ of your family and of your of your employees so we constantly we train them we test them and then we try to trick them over and over again train them test them try to trick them and I guarantee you if you if you try to do some I guarantee you people are gonna they're gonna inadvertently because the number one cause of most issues in a company is internal and often by accident it's often by accident and so that the way things get in and so there are basics to do there all the mobility mobility is a great thing this is one of the biggest things that part of the Apple partnership is all the end-to-end security because mobility also opens doors otherwise and you do emails I assume you do emails from time to time I do are they encrypted it's in some cases they are and in many in an in for work this is a really important point IBM errs all of our mail is all handled in a way that is completely monitored and protected so everybody who's got a device that many people this idea called BYOD bring your own device to work many companies do it and my advice to everyone is you've got to and what we do with our folks is every device you kind of think of it just kind of literally think of it this way that it's got a left brain and a right brain left brain person's personal stuff the right brain is your work stuff I'm gonna monitor and put a box around that and I'm gonna make sure what happens to it and if something starts to happen I I clean it I shoot it I kill it I've got to stop it so it's this idea that you have to think that way about what these devices do and protect them so we do it that way at work we actually secured the US government has been worried from time to time that Chinese computer companies are going to encrypt their put little devices in things they might send over here but are you worried that US government might take IBM products and do things to them before they're shipped overseas because there were reports of that happening to some other companies on IBM look not at all in that we have had a very and this is what I attribute to being a hundred years old made very wise decisions along the way recognize who you are and know that what why clients do business with us is because they they know and they can trust that we will handle their data so we have had policy positions for a very long time that we would never share data with the government we would never give encryption keys to a government we would never put backdoors in our software and so I cannon fatica Li no matter what government that would be I can say that so with all the employees you haven't you're in 170 countries around the world on your typical day I assume you start around 10 o'clock in the morning and go to about 5 o'clock is that your day right kind of 5:00 yes so you must I mean what percent your time you have to be traveling to keep this empire that IBM is kind of intact and show you know yourself to the troops and so forth how much of your time you spend traveling how much you spend with clients how much you spend with government look I probably do you know a third a third a third in that to me you know and again this is you have to really believe it though in your actions support it I mean the reason we exist is clients and so I fear I do spend a fair amount of time with our clients because it is about what we do for them right and I never never lose sight of that and so the clients and this day and age you've got government and issues around the world you have investors and your people right but clearly your people and clients up at the front end of that and and I know when you talk about the scale David but you know I have been in the company for that time I am quite used to that scale and so to me other things are daunting to other people I think too many IBM errs it's not daunting and because of the ability to have technology to connect and we've run as a globally integrated Enterprise Sam did a great job globally enterprise integrating the enterprise that people are quite used to how to work that way and if anything the technologies that are there today they allow me to interact with everybody so fast and so flat you know I say sometimes my job is the chief engagement officer right not just the chief executive officer and you're able to put questions out getting answers get the dialogue and and that is a really positive product of the social mobile technologies when it was announced you were gonna be the CEO of IBM did you find all of a sudden you had a lot of friends you didn't know you had before that right yeah yeah so yeah how do you have a lot of friends before to though I like to think I did so what is the hot what's the greatest pleasure of being the with the greatest pleasure being the CEO of IBM what's the let's say the least pleasure interview you know this is the greatest pleasure for me is the impact that we are able to have in doing work that matters for the world and whether that is I mean I can't be prouder of the IBM Aires whether it is the work they do with our clients or you know last night we just made an announcement working with Scripps Institute the work that we're doing on Ebola and it is about taking and allowing and enabling anybody who wants a dedicate time on their own personal devices into the worldwide community Gribbs ohrid so researchers can do work you know you can do in three minutes you can sign up and when you're not using your device researchers harness them together and they use it for their all of their research work on Ebola or whether it is the work that we have done we did some great work recently in China on green horizons on prediction on weather and a way to help with the pollution and predict for four days ahead what its gonna be you can actually take you know and make changes in the environment to stop it and improve it so it is work that matters for the world and that's where I said you know healthcare we will change the face of healthcare so you are relatively new in your position an IBM CEOs often leave at a relatively young age Lou Gerstner left that relatively young age younger and younger every day as I think about that age but would you ever consider leaving young at a young age and going to government service or something like that would you have any ambition to have another career outside of IBM or so I take it from your question you think I am young very young yes okay thank you are this technique look I am Dean ager by my stand yeah look I am young in my tenure here and I've got you know a long runway I had so I don't even think about I which I don't think is unusual right a higher calling like private equity wouldn't appeal to you so I I noticed iBM is often called big blue and they do you wear blue often because David asked me this earlier he said did you or blue cuz you know big I'm like no I work because it was next in my closet I I think that I want to thank you very much for giving us a very enlightening conversation about IBM and thank you yeah you're great let me give you a gift okay

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 127,540

Rating: 4.8158379 out of 5

Keywords: Ginni Rometty, IBM (Award Winner), 2014 - 2015 Speaker Series, David Rubenstein

Id: B9brTt_eLPo

Length: 41min 25sec (2485 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 03 2014