Top 55 Ginni Rometty Quotes

Artificial intelligence is one of 50 things that Watson does. There is also machine learning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and different analytical engines – they’re like little Lego bricks. You can put intelligence in any product or any process you have.

I don’t think anybody’s just B2B or B2C anymore. You are B2I – business to individual.

Digital, it is not the destination.

I strongly believe that through dedication and perseverance, one can overcome adversity to achieve success. It is a privilege to accept membership in the Horatio Alger Association, an organization which promotes this principle.

Don’t protect your past. Don’t protect your products.

I think, given who the IBM target company is, I feel our purpose is to be essential to our clients.

When I think of revenue growth, I think of the words ‘mix’ and ‘shift.’

It will not be a world of man versus machine. It will be a world of man plus machines.

Think about when a digital business marries up with what I’ll call ‘digital intelligence.’ It is the dawn of a new era about being a ‘cognitive’ business. When every product, every service, how you run your company can actually have a piece that learns and thinks as part of it, you will be a cognitive business.

I make time to exercise. It’s not being indulgent. I think it’s got a lot to do with your ability to manage properly and stay focused. There’s no doubt about that.

One of the most important topics I think for us all to work on is job creation.

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.

Steward for the long term. It’s not always easy, but you do it.

I was always surrounded by people that wanted to mentor you.

It’s easy to have an act one and two. Go ahead and have an act three, four, and five. The saying is the easy part. The doing is the hard part.

I am very practical.

If you ask me, ‘So what is your business model?’ Our business model’s always about shifting to higher value opportunities.

Watson augments human decision-making because it isn’t governed by human boundaries. It draws together all this information and forms hypotheses, millions of them, and then tests them with all the data it can find. It learns over time what data is reliable, and that’s part of its learning process.

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.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.

You have to stick up for what you believe in. And that, to me, is the biggest thing you can do about driving inclusion.

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.

The social network will be the new production line.

As I say to our own team: ‘Never protect your past, never define yourself by a single product, and always continue to steward for the long-term. Keep moving towards the future.’

India… what a big part you play in this story for IBM and for the world.

When you’re on a scale like we are in 170 countries and hundreds of thousands of people, you have a single point of view.

The ultimate competitive advantage is being cognitive.

I often sit back and say, ‘Be sure about what I believe.’

If you’re clear on what you believe, you have a great foundation to go make a market.

I always say, you know, if I sit here and close my eyes and say, ‘When did I learn the most in my life, in my career?’ It’ll always be when I close them and everything I think of is when I took a risk. It’s when I think I learned the most.

IBM’s long-standing mantra is ‘Think.’ What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me, is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.

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.

Work on something that matters. Have courage.

The ability to please your shareholders comes because of what you do for clients.

If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.

The amazing thing about IBM is that it’s a company where I have had 10 different careers – local jobs, global jobs, technology jobs, industry jobs, financial services, insurance, start-ups, big scale. The network of talent around you is phenomenal.

When you remove layers, simplicity and speed happen.

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.

This idea of ‘New Collar’ says for the jobs of the future here, there are many in technology that can be done without a four-year college degree and, therefore, ‘New Collar’ not ‘Blue Collar,’ ‘White Collar.’ It’s ‘New Collar.’

And the reason I came to IBM was I think – I always say at a really early age, I learned you’ve got to be passionate about what you do. 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.

This century, the 21st century, will be the Indian century – and I really believe that.

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.

Don’t let others define you. You define yourself.

If we would change the basis and align what is taught in school with what is needed with business… that’s where I came up with this idea of ‘new collar.’ Not blue collar or white collar.

If it’s digital, it will be cognitive. If you think that, you’re going to change the way you run a business.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

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.

I believe that the idea of strategic beliefs may be more important than strategic planning when thinking about how you keep the long view.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That’s all it is; culture is people’s behaviors.

Today when I think about diversity, I actually think about the word ‘inclusion.’ And I think this is a time of great inclusion. It’s not men, it’s not women alone. Whether it’s geographic, it’s approach, it’s your style, it’s your way of learning, the way you want to contribute, it’s your age – it is really broad.

You build your own strategy. You don’t define it by what another competitor is doing.

India will not be at the center – it will be the center of this fourth technology shift.

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.

One day we’re going to look back, and whatever this era will get called, it’s going to put a premium on math and science.