Ginni Rometty Quotes

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.

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.

Ask yourself when you learn the most. I guarantee it’s when you felt at risk.

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.

We share no data with the government anywhere in the world.

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

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.

You can engineer change.

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

With this emergence of big data and social mobility, you will, in fact, see the death of ‘average,’ Instead, you will see the era of you.

If we would change the basis and align what is taught in school with what is needed with business… that’s where I came up with this idea of ‘new collar.’ Not blue collar or white collar.

Don’t let others define you. You define yourself.

India… what a big part you play in this story for IBM and for the world.

I have a great job at a great company.

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

India will not be at the center – it will be the center of this fourth technology shift.

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

Someone once told me growth and comfort do not coexist. And I think it’s a really good thing to remember.

If it’s digital, it will be cognitive. If you think that, you’re going to change the way you run a business.

Planes don’t fly, trains don’t run, banks don’t operate without much of what IBM does.

I believe that the idea of strategic beliefs may be more important than strategic planning when thinking about how you keep the long view.

I make time to exercise. It’s not being indulgent. I think it’s got a lot to do with your ability to manage properly and stay focused. There’s no doubt about that.

Never love something so much that you can’t let go of it.

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.

The recommendation when I’m mentoring folks, I always tell them – and we talked about this last year – take a risk.

I don’t think anybody’s just B2B or B2C anymore. You are B2I – business to individual.

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.

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

I am big on – even with our whole team – it’s always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn’t work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?

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.

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

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

My mom had not worked a day in her life, and then she woke up when I was 15 and found herself with four children, no job, no money. But she set out and made it all OK for us, and from that, I saw that there’s no problem that can’t be solved.

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes – we started with scales.

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.

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

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

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 am very practical.

If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.

Work on something that matters. Have courage.

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.

Some people make their choice on size. I happen to not be a believer in that. I’ve often said, especially in an industry that’s clamoring for growth, if I wanted size, I wouldn’t have divested $8 billion of businesses.

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

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

I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it’s a cycle of innovation/commoditization.

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.

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.

Whatever business you’re in – it doesn’t matter – it’s going to commoditize over time. It’s going to devalue. You’ve got to keep moving it to a higher value.

I’ve always looked for challenges, and I have found plenty.

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

When you manage your company for long-term shareholders, and you manage the company for clients, two of the biggest stakeholders, you will make the right decisions.

When you remove layers, simplicity and speed happen.

Digital, it is not the destination.

The only way you survive is you continuously transform into something else. It’s this idea of continuous transformation that makes you an innovation company.

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.

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

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

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.

There will be times you make decisions that actually detract from growth.

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

One day we’re going to look back, and whatever this era will get called, it’s going to put a premium on math and science.

You have to stick up for what you believe in. And that, to me, is the biggest thing you can do about driving inclusion.

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.

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

The amazing thing about IBM is that it’s a company where I have had 10 different careers – local jobs, global jobs, technology jobs, industry jobs, financial services, insurance, start-ups, big scale. The network of talent around you is phenomenal.