Ginni Rometty

And whether that would have been really difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like, hey, we're going to change the way we do our semiconductors, and a whole different philosophy.

You have no choice.

I mean, and in times of crisis as well, you got to be, I always said it's not a popularity contest.

So that's, none of these jobs are popularity contests.

I don't care if your company's got one person or half a million, they're not popularity contests.

When you've got to change a company, it's really tempting to say throw everything else out, back to that what must endure, right?

But I know when I took over to start, I knew how much had to change.

The more I got into it, I could see, wow, a lot more had to change, right?

Because we needed a platform.

We'd always done our best when we had a platform, a technology platform.

You will go back in time and you'll think of the mainframe systems.

You'll think of the PC.

You'll think of perhaps middleware.

You could even call services a platform, right?

we needed a platform, the next platform here to be there.

Skills.

When I took over, if we inventoried who had modern skills for the future, it was two out of 10 people for the future.

Not that they didn't have relevant skills today, but for the future, two out of 10.

Yikes, that's a big problem, right?

The speed at which things were getting done.