Ginni Rometty

“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...”

“When you remove layers, simplicity and speed happen.”

“I am big on - even with our whole team - it's always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn't work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?”

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

“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.”

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

“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,...”

“Planes don't fly, trains don't run, banks don't operate without much of what IBM does.”

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

“When I think of revenue growth, I think of the words 'mix' and 'shift.'”

“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.”

“IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.”

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

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

“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 wha...”

“I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.”

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