Jun 7, 2023, 1:12 PM ETFireside Chat, Interview

Talks at GS with Ginni Rometty, Former Chairman, President and CEO of IBM

Ginni Rometty asserts that "growth and comfort never coexist," advocating for viewing risk as a positive driver for learning and progress.
She defines "good power" as the ability to solve big problems respectfully without fear, prioritizing progress over perfection.
Her leadership framework consists of five principles:
- Be in service of something (focusing on serving others rather than serving oneself).
- Build belief by appealing to both the heart and the mind.
- Know what should change while identifying what must endure.
- Act as a steward of good technology, managing both upsides and downsides.
- Cultivate resilience through practical relationship-building and attitude control.

Rometty's formative years were marked by her father abandoning the family when she was 16, leaving her mother to raise four children alone.
Her mother secured financial independence through hourly work and community college, teaching Rometty two critical lessons: never let others define you, and recognize that aptitude is evenly distributed while access to education is not.
After graduating from Northwestern University, she accepted a full-ride GM scholarship and worked at GM, where she distinguished between a "job" and a "career" by observing her peers' lack of passion.
A professor advised her to pursue a career in computers, leading her to IBM, where she spent decades advancing from a computer scientist to the ninth chairman, president, and CEO.
During her IBM tenure, she led the reinvention of over half the company's portfolio, including building a $25 billion hybrid cloud business and establishing leadership in quantum computing and AI.

Rometty identified a critical skills gap at IBM, noting that only two out of ten employees possessed the skills needed for the future.
She shifted IBM's cultural approach from "inside-out" engineering to "outside-in" design thinking to improve customer consumability and internal agility.
IBM pioneered "skills-first" hiring, realizing that people with no degrees could perform as well as or better than college graduates, with 74% of non-degree hires eventually obtaining degrees while working.
As a result of this strategy, 15% of IBM's hiring in her final year came from candidates without four-year degrees.
She co-founded "110," a coalition including Goldman Sachs, committed to upskilling, hiring, and promoting one million Black Americans without four-year degrees into family-sustaining jobs by 2030.
The coalition currently includes 75 of the largest companies in the US and requires a minimum three-year commitment from participating organizations.

Rometty warns that the current AI landscape presents a "trust in people" issue rather than a purely technological one, citing the rapid spread of misinformation.
She highlights that generative AI tools like ChatGPT achieved 100 million users in five days, compared to Netflix's 3.5 years for one million users, setting unrealistic expectations for accuracy.
She advocates for specific guardrails on AI, including watermarking outputs to distinguish human work from AI-generated content and ensuring models are not "black boxes."
Rometty believes AI will fundamentally change jobs by automating mundane routines, memorization, and data gathering, necessitating a renewed focus on critical thinking in education.
She predicts that English may soon become the primary programming language, reducing the need to learn multiple coding syntaxes as high-level capabilities evolve.
Goldman Sachs is currently encouraging employees to experiment with AI for productivity use cases while the engineering team develops safeguards for integration.

The number of women running Fortune 500 companies increased from 12 in 2011 to 53 today, a 380% increase, though Rometty notes significant work remains.
She identifies retention as the primary challenge, as organizations often hire women in equal numbers but fail to support their return after career breaks.
IBM implemented "Returnships," a program allowing women to return to the workforce for 90 days to refresh skills without the pressure of a permanent commitment immediately.
Rometty initially resisted being a role model for women but changed her stance after realizing that visibility allows others to envision their own success ("you cannot be what you cannot see").

Rometty warns that if society does not see a better future through economic opportunity (via skills-based hiring), it may vote against democracy in favor of other forms of governance.
She advises individuals and organizations to embrace discomfort as a signal of learning, suggesting that asking "are you learning anything?" should guide career decisions.
She urges businesses to act as stewards of technology by proactively implementing guardrails against misinformation rather than attempting to halt technological trends.
She recommends that educational systems rethink their curricula to prioritize critical thinking to counterbalance the rapid evolution of AI and automation.