"Don't Try to Protect the Past"

Description

Ginni Rometty has spent 36 years at IBM, where she now serves as president, CEO, and chairman of the board. She is on a protracted mission to reinvent the company as a cloud-based "solutions" business. That transformation involves moving into areas that have higher value and shedding ones that don't. IBM's new businesses around cloud, data, and security account for almost $34 billion in revenue. They're growing by more than 13% a year and constitute 42% of the company. In this interview Rometty says that IBM is trying to "unlock" the 80% of data behind the firewalls of client companies so that those organizations can use it to make better decisions, adding, "There's a $2 trillion market around better decision making." She talks about why IBM's earnings have declined for 20 consecutive quarters, what kinds of employees the company's new course demands, gender-related challenges in her career, and more.

Keywords

Artificial intelligence CEO Change management Data management Information technology Transformations