“Some of the biggest lessons I learned about
power were about how not to lead,” Ms.
Rometty, 65, said over video from her home in
Naples, Fla.
Heartily agree that she was wildly successful in not leading while CEO.
Plus, she's clearly got her eyes set on jumping into politics, no question.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ginni-rometty-learned-how-to-use-good-power-5c824ee0
The former IBM chief says some of the most important lessons in her career were about how not to lead.
By: Emily Bobrow
March 3, 2023 12:51 pm ET
Virginia “Ginni” Rometty emerged as a strong contender to run International Business Machines Corp. after she successfully led the company’s merger with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s consulting arm in 2003. Yet folding PwC’s consultants into Big Blue proved rocky at first. When months went by without hitting her profit targets, Ms. Rometty knew she needed to turn things around. What didn’t help, she says, was hearing from a superior that if she failed she was “no longer a welcome member of the family.”
“Some of the biggest lessons I learned about power were about how not to lead,” Ms. Rometty, 65, said over video from her home in Naples, Fla. Since retiring as IBM’s chairman and CEO in 2020, after nearly a decade in the job and a lifetime at the company, she says she has been thinking a lot about how power is wielded and abused. “Given the many negative stories about leaders in politics and business, people now associate power with fear, with being uncomfortable,” she says. In her new book “Good Power,” out March 7, she uses stories from her life and career to show that it is possible to lead with respect and compassion: “This idea that you can do meaningful things in a positive way seemed like a message worth telling, now more than ever.”
Ms. Rometty still vividly remembers the day her father walked out on the family, when she was 16. “For all I care, you can go work on the street,” she recalls him saying to her mother before storming out of their Chicago-area home just before Thanksgiving, leaving behind four children, a “heartsick and terrified” wife and a new mortgage. Ms. Rometty says the rupture made her a “Mama Bear” to her younger siblings, feeding them and getting them to bed while their mother worked two jobs and took community college classes at night.
Watching her mother do whatever it took to get the family off food stamps drove home the value of self-reliance. “It sure made me say I will always take care of myself and not rely on someone else,” Ms. Rometty says. Yet she had already intuited this lesson from other strong women in her family. Her widowed great-grandmother supported a son by mopping hallways and scrubbing bathrooms at night in the Wrigley Building; her grandmother, a two-time widow by 47, ran a lamp business for decades on her own. “These women took control of their own lives,” Ms. Rometty says. “Consciously or not, I learned that hard work will always move you forward.”
A college education promised a better life, so Ms. Rometty was determined to get one. “My hobby was doing homework,” she writes. She arrived at Northwestern University in 1975 with ambitions to become a doctor but soon discovered engineering was a better fit because she liked math and “loved problem solving.” A class in coding spurred her interest in the emerging field of computer science, and membership in a sorority exposed her to everything from table manners to stable homes.
A scholarship from General Motors covered much of her degree, supplied her with summer work and lured her to GM’s Detroit headquarters after college. Although Ms. Rometty had little interest in cars and trucks, she stayed in Detroit because it was where she met her husband, Mark Rometty, a supplier to the automotive industry, whom she married in 1979. She credits him with nudging her to follow her passion for engineering and computer science by interviewing at IBM. Her first job at the company involved installing and supporting IBM’s products, including its brand new personal computer in 1981.
As Ms. Rometty ascended the ranks, she gleaned what she could from her bosses. She remains grateful that her first, a branch manager named John Kennedy, was respectful, kind and clear about his expectations. “Good people attract good people,” he liked to say. Others taught her the value of asking questions, listening to learn and helping employees develop their careers.
Despite comments about her appearance from male colleagues, Ms. Rometty says she never felt disadvantaged as a woman at IBM. She says the company operated on the assumption that more diverse teams created better products: “I’m a beneficiary of that.” She says her choice not to have children had less to do with her career than with her years caring for her siblings: “I felt like I had raised my children already.”
After assuming her first managerial job in 1987, Ms. Rometty was asked to help run IBM’s new consulting business in 1991 and then to lead its global insurance unit in 1997. She admits that she greeted each promotion with apprehension, worried she wasn’t ready. When she confessed her anxieties to her husband, she says he answered with a question: “Do you think a man would have responded that way?”
Ms. Rometty found she could power through her insecurities with hard work. “It taught me such a valuable lesson, that growth and comfort don’t coexist,” she says. “To this day, I know that if I’m too comfortable it means I need to move on or check myself. Why do I think I know everything about this?”
Having run IBM’s largest global-services unit and then its consulting services business, Ms. Rometty was tasked with growing sales during the financial crisis in 2009. She sensed it was an assignment to test her mettle for the CEO job, which she got in 2011.
Ms. Rometty entered the corner office at a tough time for the 100-year-old company. IBM’s corporate customers no longer wanted to buy IBM servers and pay to maintain them, preferring to rent cloud computing services. “Technological change was accelerating at a great pace,” she observes. “We were going to need new business models, new platforms and new skills.”
She moved quickly to sell off stagnating units that accounted for nearly $10 billion in yearly revenue, such as semiconductor manufacturing, while acquiring 65 companies in higher-growth areas, like cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data analytics. She also expanded the company’s pool of tech talent by hiring for skills instead of credentials. “Too many jobs require college degrees when they don’t really need them,” she says. In 2018 IBM agreed to buy Red Hat, a distributor of open-source software and tools used by cloud developers, for an unprecedented $34 billion.
Yet Ms. Rometty failed to generate growth, and the company’s stock price lagged other tech giants during her tenure. “Sometimes it’s easier to build something from scratch than to take something that exists and move it to the next level,” she says. When she announced she was passing the torch to Arvind Krishna in 2020, shares in the company jumped.
Years later, however, some of Ms. Rometty’s bets appear to be paying off. IBM was a rare stock that beat the market last year, and analysts now praise the company’s acquisition of Red Hat for giving it an edge in a growing area known as the hybrid cloud. Other companies, such as Delta Air Lines, are now following her lead in prizing skills over degrees.
Ms. Rometty insists she doesn’t yearn for credit for her hard choices. “As a leader, you want your successor to do well,” she says. “When you are stewarding a company, you need to come to terms with the fact that many of your decisions will benefit the future, not you.”