Ginni Rometty on the Technology Agenda for the US

this good power. We are so delighted to have with us. The former chairman and CEO of IBM, Jinny Rometti, her new book is good Power, leading positive change in our lives, work and world. She's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio, Pens and Needles. So delighted to have you here. Congratulations, Thank you very much. As big milestone two years in the making, right, it's always oh yeah, we never expected

how hard it would be. That's what everybody says. I have to say, and I think Mike and I would both agree that when we started reading this, it start. It didn't start like I expected it too, And I'm sure everybody who talks to you starts there. But it is a very personal story, a very real and revealing story.

Talk to us about your family and your dad leaving. Yes, it's one of the many moments I speak of, but because I think we're all shaped like, how we lead today has a lot to do with what we experienced in the past. And I was sixteen when my father decided one day that he abandoned my mom and our whole family. He didn't realize. I walked into the garage and heard him, and I heard him say to her, I don't care about you. I don't care about any of you. You can go work on the street for

all I care. And how do you process that as a sixteen year old? Well, and you had younger siblings. I had younger siblings. Yes, I stood there, and I think I reacted because I watched my mom and she didn't cry, She turned around, she walked out. Effect I never saw a cry. And here she was the as I think now, thirty four years old, four kids, never worked a day in her life, hadn't gone to college, just barely through high school. But she was so determined. So what I the reason I start there and the

only reason I wrote a boo. Do you know you were going to start there? No, absolutely did not know that. In fact, my collaborator helped me to start there, because it's a very vulnerable moment to start. But the reason is to celebrate what she did and how she reacted, because it's like I saw my grandmother and great grandmother both had big tragedies in their life, and I saw that she had power to change something when she had nothing else. And that's kind of the premise of the book,

that we all have more than we think. And she was like, I'm not going to be a divorce, I'm not going to be someone on food stamps. I'm not going to let it end this way. And she got a little bit of education, a little bit of education, a better job, a little bit better and she never did get a degree. But it's the other thing, Well, two things I learned she taught us never let anyone define who you are, only you are. He was never going to define her as those things. And it's so

easy to go in the other direction. It is very easy to be defined as a victim and feel a victim. And the second thing was that you know someone's access to education in their aptitude are not equal. Meaning my mom really wasn't dumb. She's never had access to anything, and that would be a silver thread through my whole life that I would find to be true about you know, how people can get skills and into me. Why I work today on this when I think is so unfair

in this country and it's very solvable. How many jobs have been over credential to require a college degree when they don't need one, and so many people in this country don't have one, especially when you think in a tight labor market, maybe things could be done. I'm hoping yet absolutely well, Jenny, one of the more touching things in the book to me was and you mentioned, you know, your mom was embarrassed that on occasions she would have to use food stamps and would actually drive to the

next town over, so no one saw her. Really kind of heartwrenching moment in the book. But I wonder, you know, having seen the economy from both sides, now, what do you think about the social safety net in the US right now? Could it be done better? Is there a different way, better way to it? I am a believer in it right that it's needed and it's needed for what I saw with my mom, it's to transition people.

It's not a permanent thing. And that's to me, what can be done better is the transition part, to transition you to a better place. That's what it did for us. It transitioned us to a better place. She had to do it till she didn't have to do it, and I really feel accompanying it has to be all these things about getting people the skill so they can get a decent job. And that was really, you know, what my mom fell into. But it's such a I think,

a very practical I find it. I've had a decade of working on this topic that with some skill doesn't have to be a degree. We can give people lots of new jobs right now. So safety net until you get there, all right, So talk to us about getting to IBM in nineteen eighty one. My dad was an engineer too. You were an engineer, an engineer, open arms easy for a woman, Yeah, you know. Okay, So this is I'm sorry to have to say that's critical. I just meant yes, I'm going to answer that two ways.

Because tech is not known for obviously for its diversity, so I would often be the only woman but my first three managers at IBM were women, and so I have to just credit it is a company of meritocracy and inclusion that goes way back before me. So I was really lucky to grow up in a place like that that for the most part, although for the times, right,

I mean, it's all relative. But the only thing I remember when I went, I mean, I never won a suit before I came home from my interview, as I wrote it, took my jacket off, and my husband's like, what's on your arm. I'm like, well, it's my first suit and that is the price taggion. Still I'm like, how gracious they never mentioned it, you know, yeah, absolutely,

well go ahead, Mike. Oh no, I was gonna say, you know, so much has changed in the tech world in the last few years, with the trade war and everything. And I'm thinking back to a boy it must be twenty years ago when Lenovo bought the PC business for IBM. I can't help but think that that deal would ever go down today. It was in this climate. So how do you see all of that going, This whole tension

over tech between the US and China. Yeah, And if I've been to China once, I've been there fifty times and over my life, and to me this boils down. I've always said in the past, when people talk about it is coopetition and competition. I mean, I've really believed that the safest world is an interdependent world. That is the safest world, and that right now, I've also felt the only reason I was ever in China was if I could do something better than than the Chinese could

do it. So, in other words, your only route is to out innovate. And so when we think about what to do now, I am really happy to see the US finally really take under a serious you know, you would call it a technology agenda for the country. Right, It's been a long time since we've really had one, And I go back in time you said, yeah, Unfortunately, I've been around it five decades when some of our greatest technology innovations all started in the government and then

we're commercialized by private sector. That was the way it was done. So now we finally have a national technology agenda and yep, okay, fine, let them go off. Now we got to of course protect our intellectual property and do it better. And I mean that is to me what the focus has to be and of course some of the most sophisticated of course, you know, those not aligned you don't want to have fall into the wrong hands. And so that's how it'll be. But I'd love to

see it more around both competition and cooperation. But do you see, Jenny, that there's a clear division between the US and its technology powers in China doing it like it's not the globalization that we've been living for so long it is. What do I see a difference between the two types? Well, just meaning that there's going to be not the cooperation yet not as much cooperation, but there are things we can cooperate on the environment, okay,

and technologies around the environment. I think about that. And then on the other side, No, we've got to have our own race and really be the best in the world. So much of the US prosperity has been driven by America being the leader in technology right by far across any other country, and that's what we have to continue. And so, like I said, that's why I'm glad to see it. And then so we will continue our out innovating part of that. Immigration needs to be part of that. Yes,

I agree with that. I've always said that you know, skills have no passport, and this idea that ideas flow without a passport too. And I really believe in an essentral part of America actually is that ability to bring in skills and be a destination for people who want to innovate in a country that has rule of law protects ip. I mean, that is what brought people here. There are other countries in the world that you see when they have focused on that they've blossomed. When they close,

they don't. So that is a that is a concern. Carol Master, Mike Reagan and our Bloomberg Interactor Brokers Studio still with us as Jenny Rometti, of course, former chairman and CEO of IBM, her new book out, Good Power Leading positive change in our lives, work and world. Excuse me, good power versus bad power? Yeah, great question. What's the difference?

To me? The difference is good power does three different things versus about how to do hard things in a good way, in a good way right now, that would mean go toward attension, don't polarize yourself. So in other words, I really believe like, embrace tension. That's a good thing, do it respectfully and then just celebrate progress not perfection, and so much of what it's like my way or your way. Okay, I'm like, okay, we're never gonna get anywhere if that's the two views we're going to take.

And so if you do those three things, really practice them in like especially tension. I learned to love conflict intention because I always knew something better was going to come out the other end if I would really go into it and listen. And it was. But intention is today, I know. But you know what I mean, Like the divides and I a conflicting view. It's gotten so ugly,

so polar. I so I feel like it's its moment that that no, with all this division, there is another way to go about this, that that brings people together and it doesn't divide them. And so that's kind of what the book is meant to be. All these little tips about that I learned from watching lots of great people over the years on how they did that, and that you know, you ask young people today, hey, do you want to be powerful? They're like, no, no, no,

I want to solve important problems. And I'm like, irony is you're going to need power to do that. And so it's how you exercise it. So I actually end the book with a handwritten note that it says your greatest legacy maybe how you do your work, not what you did. You don't, Jinny. When I think back on your tenure at IBM, what an amazing transition that company made during your time, you know, really moving from a hardware primarily business US to services, cloud, everything else. And

you retired in twenty twenty. But I look at the stock price of IBM, and after an awful stock market last year, IBM pretty much reached a record high towards at the end of twenty twenty. So I feel like there's got to be some things you'd want to brag about from that from that era, you know, because it wasn't easy that. I'm sure you had some fights there to make these changes. What do you think the most

important changes are. What's the sort of top line on your resume from from your tenure there that allowed IBM to become the company it is. Yeah, I mean what I did was give it a foundation for growth. I believe in me. The lots of IBM ers worked hard, and I think this striking point is it's not just what I did. We had to change how we worked, and so yes, we had to move into all these

new areas. That's what everyone talks about hybrid cloud. We had to move you know, faster into AI, etc. But changing how so that you could work faster, that you could consumerize stuff because it's so unfair to say to a workforce, you know, hey, run a marathon, but do it in hiking boots. I mean, so, I think the biggest thing would be around changing how work was done and all of our work around diversity and inclusion. We had records on all of those. You said the magic

word there, jinny AI. That's all I was waiting for you to talk about right now. So how do you see this all playing out? Chat GBT yah, Google's efforts, IBM, where's it all going? Well, look, I am a big believer in AI, but I have always believed it would make men better man humanity. Yeah, and that you've got to think of it that way. I've been at this for way decades now, and I think finally it's reached for us and everyone's conscious. Right, That's what chat GPT did.

It made it like come to the forefront. Because AI has come in and out of interest over as winter. They call it AI winters, many of them. So now it's in front of everyone. To me, it is finally teed up the most important issue with technology, which is that if we don't build trust into this technology, it is going to have a very bad ending. And it's a sha we do that. We acquire regulators, like how do we ab I have a very strong view. Trust comes when you manage the up and the downsides of

something at the same time. So that means, all right, I introduced yet all right, do people understand it? Is it explainable? We got to get that done quickly? Do they know how it's trained? Garbage in, garbage out? All right? And it makes sense? And then depending on the kind of problem I really tell people to use it for, they have a very different tolerance level I learned on technology. If it's searching, you get a wrong movie back, you

don't care. If it's about your health, you care. You got a bad answer, even though your human doctor could be wrong some percentage of depending on the doctor of time. So this idea of trust means take responsibility for it. So the onus is on companies. It's gonna be on companies, the users and the builders have even greater responsibility. Out always felt that, and so that you are telling people a how to use it, be what it's trained with, or see let's say I train it and it's my

proprietary data. I don't want that train thing going to the next guy. So we got to work on all this at once. You need regulation. Here's my big point on regulation, precision regulation. Do you like that you can open your phone with your face? That makes it pretty fast, gloves on you don't want to do, okay, but you don't like facial recognition for things like racial profiling. So we should regulate the uses of it, not the technology itself.

Because we try doing that. People who make laws don't really understand the details of it that this is going to go nowhere, but they do understand the uses, and so that would be how I would do the regulation, because you want it to flourish. I have tried to whole technology trends back in the past. You can't stop them.

Do you think this is like kind of the biggest thing that's going to be just I think it's a really big turning point, and I actually think it's got the propensity to make you and me do our jobs better, and so I think it's going to bring and can uplift a lot of people into better jobs. At the same time, we got to mitigate the downsides. And that's like active just like social media. Right, yes, great, great, great,

until then there were some bad things. You'd like to have pulled back the clock and said, let's work on the bad at the same time. Does that making it a little nervous? Though that social media has had its problems, still get me from all of this we learned, yet we're not well. I think that now when you talk about all the companies involved, and you know, you talk about banks using a telcos. These are mature companies. They recognize that the one attribute they have the world cares

about his trust. And so I think when you think that way, you're going to think twice about how you introduce it to the world. So I'm hopeful about that. Well, there's that risk of backlash too, you know, I'm thinking back too. Yeah, if people don't understand something, fear and revolt. Right. Well, remember when IBM's Big Blues started beating the chess mass. This is I learned very much trying to introduce technology, like introduce AI to doctors. I learned. The biggest thing

was this was not a technology issue. The doctors had to make the time to change how they worked. They're very busy day in and day out. They didn't necessarily trust what data trained it. I mean, there was a you're we're seeing this play out one more time. I keep looking at my list because I have a million more questions and we run out of time. Thirty forty seconds, you do, I have to ask you because you're you see so much. You're on corporate awards JP Morgan, Cargill

and others, Northwestern, I'm failing. You're no thirty seconds. How would you describe kind of this environment right now? You know, in many ways it's a perma crisis. I've heard used as a word. Right there's so many at one time, and so it's I think we'll be living with that uncertainty for a very long time. And on an up note, I think these are the moments when you can back

to how I started this. Companies and people can define who they are in people's minds, and so I think right now I put a premium on trust if I was a company, on everything I did for my customers, my partners, etc. Because this is going to be with us for a long time, and when's the last time he ate tripe? That's what I want to know. You know, in spaghetti sauce, it tastes pretty good, very tender. I have to say it was a couple of decades ago. You have to read her book to find out why.

Jenny Rometti, thank you so much. Good Power is the book. Check it out, everybody. This is Bloomberg Radio.