Greg McKeown:
Welcome everybody. I’m your host, and I am delighted to welcome esteemed guest on the Greg McKeown podcast. This is Ginni Rometty. She is the former chairman and CEO of IBM. Ginni has orchestrated, when she was there, one of the most pivotal transformations in the tech giant’s hundred-year history, not only reinvented half of its portfolio but also forged a $25 billion hybrid cloud business, which is obviously a nontrivial change in any estimation, but also at a critical time in IBM’s history and attained leadership in AI, in quantum computing, which of course also maybe now seems obvious, but not necessarily at the time.
Ginni’s influence stretches way beyond technical innovation, however, she spearheaded an innovative high school program, now in over 28 countries, aimed at equipping the next generation for the future workplace. Her efforts at the business roundtable have also reshaped the corporate ethos, emphasizing stakeholder value over simple profit metrics. Recognized as Fortune’s number one most powerful woman for three consecutive years, Ginni is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an officer of the French Legion d’Honneurtaine.
Despite these accolades, her personal saga of overcoming adversity is what captures my imagination the most. Perhaps Ginni’s journey is a manifestation of resilience, of really, I think one should say, pure determination, themes that permeate her new book, Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World. It’s divided into three sections, me, we, and us, and Good Power intertwines memoir storytelling with practical coaching, creating, to use words from the book, a memoir with purpose. So this book not only chronicles Ginni’s professional maneuvers but also her personal evolution into a proponent of Good Power. We’ll get into all of that.
She is currently co-chair of 110, a nonprofit committed to connecting individuals without college degrees to substantial employment opportunities. So, in Good Power, we’re invited to redefine the concept of power, using Ginni’s narrative as a powerful reminder of the broad impact, impact, and thoughtful and inclusive leadership that we can have. Ginni Rometty, a true visionary, and adventurer, welcome to the podcast.
Ginni Rometty:
Thank you, Greg. That’s quite an introduction. I very much appreciate it.
Greg McKeown:
Well, we need to start at the beginning because that’s what you do. The first third of the book seems to elevate and celebrate an idea, not a phrase you use in the book, but the one that’s close to my heart. The idea of an intergenerational self, that we are defined by all of those people around us and the experiences we’ve had as a child with our grandparents, perhaps great-grandparents, siblings, everything.
And this is how you. You didn’t have to write the book in this way, but you did. Maybe if I could just start with the question why? Why did you spend a third of the book trying to lay out that part of your story?
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah, it’s an excellent question. And I’d never heard that phrase, an intergenerational self. I may steal that. Give you credit for it. I actually think it’s something that I wish I’d reflected on earlier in my life, in my business, I sort of say to people, now, close your eyes. And who do you see when they’re closed when you think about your past? And to me, I see a number of those people that are in the first third of that book, and they are all people that when they had nothing, they had power.
And that was a very interesting observation. And to me, it said a lot about who I was. And it’s funny when people have read the book or people that have worked for me for many, many, many years, they’re like, gee, now I understand exactly why you are like, you are, right. I actually. You had another interview. You had another friend of mine on Bill George, who wrote a book True North. Right. And he said, “You’re going to know yourself first.”
And so I think it’s worth doing, because, to me, it formed the tenets of what I would later reflect on, that I really believe, that are at the core. And so Good Power was nothing that I sort of coined or felt I led with. It was only, in retrospect, looking backward. And a lot of that had to do with what I learned early in my life, as you say, intergenerational.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I was curious about that, whether these stories were stories that you had told the people closest to you and, you know, in a leadership set, or whether this was more in this phase of reflection. It sounds like it was more of a phase of reflection.
Ginni Rometty:
No, it probably a little bit in this, I’d say, middle of my career or middle of even my tenure as CEO, I would begin to tell them. And for those listening, I mean, obviously, the biggest thing that shaped me was when you mentioned when I was a young teenager, my father abandoned our family, and he left my mother with four children and no money, no home, no food. And she was a strong woman, but she had never been to anything past high school.
And I would be the one to witness him do this. And it was just happenstance. They were in a garage in the home, and I walked in, he didn’t see me there, and I would hear what he would say to her, and he would tell her he didn’t care what happened to any of us and he would turn and leave, and that would be it.
And in that moment, it would be very defining to me both that moment and what would happen after. Because here’s my mom at that time. She’s only 32 years old with four kids and nothing. And now, what could she have done? And there are a lot of ways she could have reacted, but instead, she was so determined not to let my dad, as I look back now, define who she was. So she got a little bit of education, a little bit better job. I mean, we had to go on things like in America, you would know that as welfare and, you know, ways to be able to eat, to be able to eventually not become homeless. And so she got a little better job than a little better job, a little better job. And, you know, it would really teach me that she was so determined that only she could define who she was. And I think that would be a big lesson that will now, as you probably, as you’ve read the book, you see it over and over, I always. I sort of felt limitless because I watched my mother define who she was and my grandmother and my grandma, et cetera.
And in a funny way, that childhood sort of bookended a set of lessons for leaders to me in that, on one hand, my dad set a bar for what bad was in the world. So I would face some of the most difficult transformations of IBM’s history, but always in the back of my head would be, okay, but this isn’t bad. I know what bad is. You know, bad. Homeless and bad is having nothing and bad. Okay, so that set of bars for bad that nothing else would ever meet.
And then on the other hand, it bookended it with, but there was always a way forward. I mean, I saw this through everyone I was raised by—no victims, always a way forward. So I say to people, you know, people who listen hopefully to this podcast, you know, it’s something I wish I’d done even earlier in my career, not the last years or 15 years, because that reflection makes you more vulnerable, and vulnerability makes people follow you more. So it’s a really actually strong sort of leadership tool. If you can be authentic, vulnerable people will follow that.
Greg McKeown:
It seems to me that it’s really easy to work with people, even for many years, in a professional setting. And we’re in such a transactional mode, you know, just the latest email or the latest meeting. It’s almost like their title is their whole identity. To us, you know, it’s almost a revelation that they had a different title or lived a different life. Outside of this.
I have a little exercise I’ve done sometimes where, in eight minutes we’ll get people to basically draft out their whole life story, zero to this moment, and then share it with other people. And people will admit that they know someone better from that eight minutes exercise. Others they’ve worked with for years, ten years, 20 years even. There really is a tendency, I think, for transactional communication to become the norm in corporations.
Coming back to this point, I look at you today, and I think, here you are, this extraordinarily polished executive CEO, member of all of these boards. And as I look at you in this current format, it reminds me of an insight that my eldest daughter had when she was in elementary school. And it was the idea that each of us, whatever age we are, we are that age plus the year before plus the year before plus the year before.
So here she is in this poem saying, well, I’m ten years old, but I’m also nine and eight and seven and six, and that all of those versions of us live within us. Like we could say the different circles on a tree if you cut it down. And you can see all of those years.
When I look at you now, having read the book, I can’t help but see you as that 16-year-old, the eldest daughter of four, which, by the way, my own daughter is also the eldest of four. And see through her, you feeling so responsible?
Ginni Rometty:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Disproportionately responsible. Even if your father had been fully operational, effective doing, you know, let’s say, his duties, responsibility, you’d still have felt enormous responsibility as the eldest daughter of four. And yet, you were put in a different kind of position. I mean, am I getting that wrong? I mean, it seems to me that we’ll have been enormously formative for you. I am responsible. I need to take care of everybody. And a burden, too.
Ginni Rometty:
That’s an interesting imagery you pick up because as I was starting the book, I kept saying to the person who helped me do the writing, I’m not a superb writer, so she would help me a bit. But I kept telling, I keep seeing this image in my mind of when you drop a pebble in water, and there’s a first ring, second, and a third. And I feel that’s true for everyone. You just described it as your daughter described the years and the sum of them in that you don’t realize that you are the sum of those ripples. Right. And that as time goes on, whether it’s you’re wiser or more able to impact or have greater influence, and it just happens little bit and little bit over time that that happens. And so the imagery is very true to me and how I think of what you just described.
And I do believe when you said, did I feel that way? And I think many people in those positions feel that way, felt very responsible. And I also felt, here’s my poor mother. She’d been through enough that none of us could cause her more heartbreak. Right? She never said anything, she never cried, but we all felt this duty to try to don’t be trouble. Right? And to help.
And my mom even says to this day now I never had children. And my mother will say, “You had your children already.”
Because I had to help, really raised my sister and my brother because my mom had to work. And so what she couldn’t do, I would, I even can remember going to like, parent-teacher things, and I was a kid, but you just do what you have to do. And I think everyone does, really. So I’m not sure,Greg. I don’t feel that special about it. I tell the story because I think everyone’s had something in their life like this.
And I can remember having a discussion with Brene Brown about, you know, she’s like, “A lot of, you know, people who’ve been successful have had tragedies in their lives.”
And I asked her, you have to have that. And you know her as one person, you may have a different view. Was that, well, not necessarily a tragedy, but it does. They seem to have had to go through some adversity and learn how to deal with adversity. And it was in the context of a conversation about young people today and parents who want to make all their problems go away versus let the kids do in the problem deal with them because it actually builds that, you know what we’re talking about here, right?
Over time, it adds those ripples. And as your daughter saw, all the wisdom from her prior years gets added together. So I think it’s a really good imagery and it’s why I tell the story, to get people to earlier reflect back on there. And it’s really because it can be a really powerful tool for you.
Greg McKeown:
Winston Churchill has some saying along these lines that, that there’s nothing so empowering, he said, as being shot at and not dying, you know, and he’s talking literally in the wars that he was in prior to the second world war. But there’s something in that in the way you’re talking about these stories, you say, okay, this is like the worst situation ever. This is an extremely challenging family dynamic to take on. But as I get through it, I go, well, what are you going to do to me now?
What, what? I’m, I’ve, I’m, I have power, as you say. You didn’t know that that was the word at the time. But I, I’ve been through it. I already dealt with these things you can’t do to me worse than what’s happened to me before. And so that gives you a sense of what? A sense of confidence, of competence? Of what, what did it give you?
Ginni Rometty:
That’s very interesting. You certainly have a sense of resilience, and you certainly have that sense that there’s no bad ending to anything.
Greg McKeown:
There’s no bad ending to anything.
Ginni Rometty:
At worst case, you learn something. And so, and I think I’ve seen a quote from you on that topic, by the way. But then, you know, it’s not a failure when people ask me those questions, which I really don’t like that one about, like, what’s your greatest failures? And what I have, like lots of things I’ve learned, but as long as I’ve learned something, I don’t consider it a failure. Right. I’m like, “Okay, well, I certainly got a good lesson out of that one,” right?
Greg McKeown:
I have a friend who says you either have a success or you get a story. And I think that’s the same spirit of which you’re speaking here. It’s like, look, you just do something, and you try it, and that’s a bias for action.
I’m curious about how you were able to turn, I think, a situation that could have been devastating. Right. It’s the kind of stuff that people would say, well, that is traumatic, and it’s just trauma, and that’s it. But for you, it was post-traumatic growth, right? Like this idea of resilience. And you speak about it in a very polished wave. And as you’re saying it now, you know, yes, it’s resilience, but how did it not break you? Or did it break you at first, and you grew through it? Are we just hearing the version this many years on this much success?
Ginni Rometty:
That’s a very good question because I’m really clear in the book that it’s retrospective, right?
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Ginni Rometty:
When things are retrospective, I always say this wasn’t the history at the moment, right? This is now back, it’s a revisionist history. Right? So. Which I often say that’s very interesting. But I think another takeaway. So how do you get through it is there were many people around me, and I think most people have this, too, that if you are willing to both learn and see what’s around you, you can survive something, right?
And so, as you know, again, you read the book. So, you know, I mean, I had strong women beyond my mom, right? My great grandma, my grandma. But they all suffered horrible tragedies. So my great grandma is the last person alive leaving Belarus in World War I. And she would lose a child at two years old, and her son at 20, my grandfather. She would be widowed. She’d never speak English. She’d clean bathrooms in the Wrigley building. My grandma would be twice widowed by the age of 47. She would hand sew lampshades to make money so I could have clothes. My aunt, my mother’s sister, her son would drown in Lake Michigan. I mean, all of these, yet I witnessed it. So you say, how do you get through that?
I watched that. None of them were ever a victim. Never spoke that way. I watched every one of them. And this is kind of something that may be out of fashion now. When things were worse, they worked harder. And so that hard work actually had a value. You know, it moved something forward.
So that would always be in my mind that, you know, hard work. And probably the thing that turned into, like, this first thought, as I now try to, like, codify good power, was they were in service of something else. It was their childhood. It was my mother. It was us. As kids, when you’re in service with someone else, you care that they’re okay before you care about yourself. So I would witness that with one woman after another in my life right around me, that they were in service of something else. And so when you say, how did you get through it? I guess, yes, it could have brought, oh, don’t get me wrong. I had plenty of tough things I had to deal with that I thought would have killed me.
Greg McKeown:
You’re surprised it didn’t kill you?
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah. I would say, oh, this will either kill me, or it’s going to be a good ending, you know. In the back of my head was always this feeling of that bad ending. There’s always a way through this. And so, from what I had witnessed. And so, again, do you have to see that from others, or can you believe it? From learning and reading, you know, watching me, that’s possible because, you know, what all those people did, you know, it’s not a fancy word, resilience, because I think resilience breaks down to two things.
They controlled their own attitude, and your attitude is in your control. And so, you know, I don’t feel like it’s something that everybody can’t do because we all can control our attitudes. And it’s your choice how you want to look at things. And I, as you can tell, then probably you go, “Oh, she’s a glass half full.”
But I tell the stories because I, like, I wasn’t living in a glass-half-full life, but look at the glass-half-full side of almost everything.
Greg McKeown:
And then you said there was a second part to resiliency as well.
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah, well, this is to me. Boy, I would learn it many times. And it’s probably a secret of, like, who I am now. It’s this idea of relationships. And I, and it’s, I think it’s a very misunderstood topic because many people think, like, for leadership, “Gee, to get things done, you need a network.”
Quote, network, it’s who you know, I just saw an article yesterday on that, and I really don’t agree with that.
My view is you want as many relationships as you can find. What I found they did for me was they gave me a perspective that I didn’t have. And you can drown yourself in anger or fear or be paralyzed. And often people say, “No, no, no, you’re looking at this the wrong way, or you’re worked up about this, and you shouldn’t be.”
So you need lots of, like, variations to learn from. But the most important thing is how you get those is really early in your career. And it’s by what you give people, not by what you take from them. And that, to me, is a profound difference in how most people think of relationships.
So I can remember, like, when I was a we type beginning to work, and a man I worked with said to me, “If anyone asks for you for help, you give it to them.” And he said, “That will pay itself off over your lifetime.”
And now, this doesn’t mean that you just, you know, don’t do your own work or whatever, but it was, by and large, I always made time when people needed help, I would help for nothing in return. Not transactional, to your words, a little bit earlier.
And for me, those relationships that came from what you gave paid back over decades of time. And there are the two things of resilience, those relationships which are about, you know, the variety. It’s not the amount of time a lot of people think, oh, God, you got to spend so much time. It’s the quality of the time. Right? I mean, even with my husband to do a job like I did. And I’ve been married now for 45 years.
Greg McKeown:
Congratulations.
Ginni Rometty:
There were many times I was away and. But in those moments, to be present, you know, I mean, I can remember I would. I would go to the restroom or something, and I’d be gone 20 minutes. He’d be like, “Well, you had your phone in there, didn’t you? And, you know, or he’s like, put the phone down.”
In just those moments to be able to concentrate. And so those relationships are the quality of them, the variety of them, what you give. That was a huge source of resilience to me, as was my own attitude. Right? I mean, a lot of tricks of attitude, too.
Greg McKeown:
But, yes, I love this second part of the resilience tree. Let’s say that they’re both necessary elements. When people think of resilience, I think they think mostly of the attitude subjects. It’s being optimistic within yourself. It’s seeing the good that this could be happening for you, not to you. It’s those kinds of, in a sense, mental tricks or ways of seeing.
But this second area, the relationship based resilience, I think, is an under appreciated area. I want to dig into it for a moment. In one way I want to dig into it is just to go back to Baba. I don’t know if I’m saying it right, but this is your great-grandma.
Ginni Rometty:
That’s great grandma, yes.
Greg McKeown:
She came from Minsk, which is where some of my ancestors came from as well, and around the same time, escaping the terrible conditions of what was going on in Minsk at the time, especially in the pogroms. And I don’t mean specifically only, Baba, but that is an illustration.
This idea of intergenerational self, for example, is not my term. It comes from some research about resiliency, specifically, that if someone has a sense of intergenerational self, they will be more resilient. Specifically, for the reasons that you have already outlined yourself. Because you see people going through, or if you didn’t see them, you hear about their stories, you read about their stories of them going through difficult times and what they did about it, so that they create within you a kind of script. It’s not your own script, but it feels like it is because you say, “Well, what you do in difficult circumstances is this.”
And you actually know what to do about it. And so, even again, in this 1st third of the book, this intergenerational story, I think, really illustrates what you’re describing about the relationship-driven resiliency narrative.
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah, well, no, other than I feel like, gee, I shouldn’t have written it. Cause it’s been written already, so.
Greg McKeown:
No, not at all. No, no. It’s underappreciated and well-illustrated by you. Go ahead.
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah, I do think it’s under appreciated, which is why I try to get people to say now, people listening, saying, gee, I wanna grow as a. Doesn’t have to be a leader in business, just as a person. Right? And if you take that time to think about that because you are the composition of all of these things, and if you take the time to learn from it. Right? And that idea that I did witness that thing about hard work, such a funny, simple thing, you know? But, like, I watched that hard work thing always, and it somehow did advance the ball a little bit for every one of their situations.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Ginni Rometty:
You know, look, it would form a big belief in my mind that would way, decades later, also influence me on that people’s aptitude is not equal to their access. So, in other words, like, my mom was actually really bright, but she had no access to education or anything. And that we’ll talk later about what it is. Like what you mentioned, I do now with people without four year degrees because God spreads talent pretty evenly in the world. Access to things, not so much. Boy, did that open my eyes to, like, huge pools of people that are of great value but just don’t have that same access.
And that’s one thing to read about that. It’s another way to very viscerally feel and see it, right? That access and aptitude are not equal. And I witnessed it with my mother in what happened. And so I think, you know, those that you called intergenerational makes a difference.
Now, I wanted to disagree with you but augmented your comment about attitude because, yes, a way forward, you know, your own attitude about that is, as you say, much is written about that. But I do think there are some other parts of attitude that are under appreciated, in your words.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Ginni Rometty:
One is, you know, now, this came from what I witnessed, an ability to compartmentalize problems. Because I think the other thing that can be paralyzing is you have a setback, something bad, and it just permeates. Have you ever been, I mean, I’ve certainly fallen in the trap or been with people that they can’t get off of it, and they keep reliving it over and over and over, and you’re like, I would learn to put those problems in a box.
Like, okay, did I have a little bit of a plan to deal with it? Yes, I got the plan. Put it in the box, put it on the shelf, and take it off of my shelf space, right? And get on to the next thing. So, that ability to compartmentalize problems is also what I think allows you to move forward.
Greg McKeown:
I love the way you described it and the way that you illustrated him physically with your hands and so on. It’s like, I’m watching someone who has done this a lot. That’s how that rang to me. And I know the difference between that and the other because the other is to be flooded by the memory of reliving the thing. And what we know in the data is that if you put somebody in an MRI machine and have them relive an experience, so if you read to them a story of, something that happened that they themselves wrote, so you’re just reading them their own words. The brain cannot discern the difference between the retelling of it and the actual experience. So it’s as major as it happening again.
And so when you have this repetitive, which everybody listening to this has had this happen to them, where they’re the same thing, the same trauma is being relived and relived and relived. I mean, it’s literally being relived, and that’s why it’s so damaging. So, what you’re saying to me is non trivial, but how do you do it really, like, beyond what you just said, like, how did you learn to do it? How did you…yeah, how did you learn to do it?
Ginni Rometty:
Well, it’s a good question. I’m not sure. I think I learned by watching others. Right? So I am a big believer of, you can learn from everybody around you, right? So when people go, oh, I want one mentor, I’m like, oh, that’s a problem. You don’t want, like, most people, if you want to learn from them, they’ll be your mentors, you know, so you can have thousands. And I think I just watched great leaders do that, that had, you know, one issue after another. So how do you make it through that? And what it makes you do is a problem comes up, it forces you to action because you can’t put the box on the shelf until there’s an action plan for it of some kind.
So it would force me to kind of push, like, how do I get this thing to go forward, whatever it is, in some way, to the next step, not perfect, just the next step so that I can take it off my head for a minute and know that it’s going to advance the other thing it forced me that I watched do, was it like you said, what did I learn? I learned to like conflict. And most people do not like conflict because some of those things that you’ll play over and over in your head are probably relationship-driven with someone, something.
And it’s like, this makes me so mad!
Greg McKeown:
Unresolved issues and unspoken conversations.
Ginni Rometty:
It just, you know, and it could be that, it could be a client, it could be a colleague, a family member, and it would, it forced me to learn by doing because I watched other people do it. I watched people who always wanted to go towards, they always volunteered for the problem. And I’m thinking most people are like, I don’t want to get near that thing and always would volunteer. And I thought, well, why do they volunteer? And I watched, and I watched a person who always took a client who was up mad and wanted that client. And I thought, why do you always want that client?
And I watched her say, look, most of the time if you a listen to learn and not tell them something, you’re actually going to find both elements of truth, things that it can be resolved, something in the middle. And more than that, you will come out the other side with a stronger relationship with that person 90% of the time. And you know what it’s about, right? 90% of the time. It may not be perfect, but it’ll be better.
Greg McKeown:
There is specific research on this, too, which suggests that shows that if you’re in a customer service situation, for example, and you have a bad customer experience and you go and you complain about it, and somebody resolves it for you, then you have a higher loyalty to that brand than you had before the problem, which is it’s so counterintuitive, and yet as soon as you apply that to all relationships, you say, as soon as we know we can handle a problem and we can get to the other side of it as friends, let’s say, or as colleagues, and we’ve resolved it now our relationship is tested, and it’s stronger now. And we know psychologically well if another problem of that size comes along, we know we can handle it. And so there’s something very safe about that because it’s been tested. It leads me to the thought that sometimes I don’t try to have conflict, but whatever conflict exists explode in a very small way as soon as possible because I’ve seen over the years of my career when I don’t do that, the relationship hasn’t been proved. So then you feel less inclined to deal with the conflict. And so then it gets worse and worse on the unresolved nature of it gets worse.
Tell me, when you say you learned to like conflict, tell me more about that, because you’re right. Most people run away from it.
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah, I will. When I’m talking to us, I’ll say, “Hey, how many people like conflict?”
You know, like 10% of the room would raise their hand, right? If even that many. And the way I learned, it’s one of those things that’s very frightening, but you do it. And then when you went, oh, this came out better, I’ll do it again. And that starts small, and it gets bigger. And so, like, I can remember a colleague that he was constantly, I felt like every time I got in a meeting, he’ll constantly throw a bomb in front of me like I was doing something, and he tried to prove it was wrong, right, and that it was going to be bad.
And I thought to myself, “Okay, now wait. The enemy is, like, outside, usually the company, not in it.”
And I finally mustered up the courage to go and see the person, and I said, “Why are you doing this to me? Like, why are you always trying to, like, lay a trap for me to fall into? And I’m like, or do you want to help me fix this thing? Or do you just want to trap me like a bear?”
And, you know, it never happened again after that. Right. And then, was he really helpful? No, but it never happened again. And he was a little helpful. Right. And so that would be an example of it. Didn’t solve it completely.
But, boy, and over time, I can remember with IBM, I mean, they were different, and we had quite a transformation to go through. And I can remember a very famous investor and business person. I was at a conference, and he said some very negative things I didn’t think were right.
Everyone’s looking at me, and he’s up on the stage. I went up to him afterward, and I said, “Look, you don’t know me. And the things you say I don’t even think are correct. You can continue to say them, and you know it. Quite a megaphone.” I said, “Or do you want to sit down? And if you believe that, why do you believe that? Or what do you think you’d do differently if you were me?”
And in a so long story short, you know, we met for breakfast in New York City. He’d had, like, four pages of handwritten notes of what he thought, and we went through them, and maybe there was one idea in there and you know, he never did it again. And he also became more of a help he was trying to help rather than destroy.
And I think that that would be another. It would reinforce to me why you have to, when you see things like that, or a business issue, by the way, as well, conflict. I mean, my big thing with conflict is if ever you think there’s a right and a wrong, you’re headed to a bad place and not a compromise. I write about this idea that there’s a third way through many times, and you may have to, like, sit in an ugly conflict for a while. And that’s what happened with my semiconductor business. I won’t go through that all here. But both answers were not good. Your shareholders wanted one thing, and clients wanted another. You can’t split that baby. And so. But we found a third way to approach it that was able to address everything. But that took a year.
But it’s that idea of, okay, don’t try to, like, either get too bad answers. Don’t try to compromise. Yes, I had to be very. I had to deal with problems for a full year to get there, but we found a third way through it, which was very liberating. So I guess I can only tell people how to learn. It is to start small, like you said, and keep going. And you’ll teach yourself because you will realize almost all the time, you come out in a better place than where you started.
So if that’s true, why wouldn’t you try every time to like it, right. And to go at it.
Greg McKeown:
Who did you first observe doing this? Or did you just observe lots of people who were good at doing this?
Ginni Rometty:
It’s funny you asked. No one’s ever asked me that. I probably, interestingly, first observed with my mom because my youngest sister wanted to play on the boys’ little league team. Now, this is. She is 55 now, so go back in time. And they told her no. And my mom went there, and she marched in, and my little sister got on the baseball team, the little league team. She was the only girl on the team.
And this is back in the sixties.
Greg McKeown:
This is like a scene from have you seen Young Sheldon, the TV show? There is an episode exactly as you describe it. I can’t believe this. Carry on. Carry on. So, did you see that? Were you there when that happened?
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
But you observed her having that conversation?
Ginni Rometty:
Yes. She didn’t make a big deal out of it. It was like, yeah, well, that’s the right thing to do and go have an understanding of why was this happening. And sure enough, and she went, and darling got on the. On the baseball team, and she played Little League forever. So, you know, she’d go on, by the way, to get a full ride to Ohio State for women’s softball. So it just goes to show you, right, it does.
Greg McKeown:
And what caught my attention just then is she didn’t make a big deal out of it. And I think that’s an interesting phrase because I think the nature of conflict, how it feels inside of us, and then how sometimes we do deal with it when we haven’t been dealing with it for a long time, is it comes out in ugly ways. And so we form a relationship with conflict, which is either I can be silent about this, or we can have it out, and it’s terrible.
And so of the two, especially in a corporate setting, although I guess it’s in a lot of ways, it’s true in family settings, too, is that we just hold on to it, wanting to avoid the bad fallout. But what you’re describing is, hey, someone who dealt with the conflict but not in a way that escalated it.
Ginni Rometty:
Yeah. So a very good point. And this would get to the heart of the definition of Good Power because I would feel my timing antennas are not always correct by the way. I was a decade earlier on AI. Okay,
Greg McKeown:
A little too early.
Ginni Rometty:
Just a little too early to talk about. But this idea that my timing antenna right now about power, I think, is exactly right, and it’s why the book has resonated with people as its kind of confluence of, when I started writing, it was this feeling that people think power is ba. And like to be potent, it does not have to be bad, in my view.
And that I would see young people say, “Oh, gee, I do not want to be in a powerful position.”
And I’m like, “Well, the irony is you got to be in a powerful position if you want to get something done.”
And I think this idea that it can be done, something you just said, my view is it can be done. You can love tension, but you can do it respectfully. You can do it respectfully, not from a source of fear. And by the way, you could also accept that you just want to make a little progress. Like, my mom wasn’t trying to solve all young girls in all sports in every place at the moment. She just wanted my sister to play on this team, and that was the beginning, and that was progress.
So it’s funny, it was that definition of Good Power is love tension, don’t divide people, try to bring together, but do it respectfully, come from a place that’s not fear, and celebrate progress. Not perfection. If you don’t consider success until the whole thing’s done, forget it. You will be unhappy always. If you’re willing to say, okay, I can celebrate progress, right?
I can remember someone once said to me in the throes of our this difficult transformation IBM ever had to make. And they said, “Transformation should be celebrated, not endured.”
And I thought that was a pretty profound comment. It kind of applies to everything you do, right?
