I learned to always take on things I'd never done before.
I have a great job at a great company.
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.
If I have learned nothing else in all my years here, my biggest lesson is you have to constantly reinvent this company. That's how you get to be 103 years old.
Digital, it is not the destination.
No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.
The recommendation when I'm mentoring folks, I always tell them - and we talked about this last year - take a risk.
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.
If you ask me, 'So what is your business model?' Our business model's always about shifting to higher value opportunities.
I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.
You have to stick up for what you believe in. And that, to me, is the biggest thing you can do about driving inclusion.
What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.
We have started something called the Corporate Services Corps. Now, it was modeled after the Peace Corps from long ago, the 1960s. And the idea was in this modern day and age, how do you get IBM'ers around the world to be global citizens? You know, globally aware, contribute, understand how to work in that environment, but do it on scale.
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 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.
You make the right decision for the long run. You manage for the long run, and you continue to move to higher value. That's what I think my job is.
When I think of revenue growth, I think of the words 'mix' and 'shift.'
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.
Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.
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.
