Cultivating good power with longtime IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
33:27 Share

TED Audio Collective.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. These days we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Ginny Rometty, the longtime CEO, chairman, and president of IBM. As the ninth leader of the century-old company and the first woman to take the helm, Ginny spearheaded major change, building a massively successful cloud business and making IBM a frontrunner in AI and quantum computing. I brought Ginny to the Authors at Wharton series to discuss her new book, Good Power, and I was taken aback by how she walks her talk.

I watched her treat our staff and students with rare dignity and curiosity, not only fielding their questions, but also showing a sincere interest in their experiences and their insights. So here's my conversation from the stage with an unusually down-to-earth leader.

The place I wanted to start is what did you want to be when you were growing up? Did you know you were going to be the CEO of IBM? Oh, come on. No. Nope. I am sad to tell you I had no vision. I had only hoped at one point that I could be independent, make enough money to support myself, and maybe I thought about being a doctor.

until I could not pass human reproduction. I just thought, I want to be independent. I hope to do okay. I hope if I do a job okay, I'll get another job. And that was where I started. When did you start to realize that you might be able to run one of the biggest tech companies on earth? You know, wow. Okay. When did you think you'd be a bestselling author?

The day it happened. Okay, yeah, exactly the answer. That is exactly, honestly, how I felt. I know a lot of people, and you've probably interviewed lots of people, Adam, that say, oh no, I wanted to be this from the very beginning. And I even deal with lots of people that worked for me. They're like, no, no, I don't want to be this. And I always tell them, please, please don't say what you don't want to be yet. And just let life unfold. Because I never felt that way either. And I probably even didn't realize I could do it until I was

well into my 40s after I'd done some super hard stuff, then I thought, okay, maybe I could do this, but never ever where it started.

I don't know if I'm a part of a generation that was that way, that was just like, "Look, if I do a good job, it's my ticket to do another thing." Well, I think in some ways that's a relief to some of the folks in the audience. But on that note, I was actually just hearing from an undergrad this afternoon that all of her friends feel like they're already behind. This is one of my greatest worries. Actually, my husband and I were both talking about it. Someone said, "What advice would you give a graduating class?" or something. So I decided to ask him that question, what would he give? Now, he's like a type Z, I'm an A, and so I'm like, "What would the Z say?" And he goes,

I would tell them to just let life unfold. They're too impatient. And he said, and honestly, I worry about all of you in the sense of, God, I'm like, I could never get into your school now. And the pressure and the intensity in the competition that is so high. So I worry about a generation that feels like, oh my God, I'm already losing before I've even started, right? Like my advice to that question would have been,

Ask more questions and you have answers. That's like my advice when you leave. And if you do, I guarantee you'll go somewhere you want to go at the end. I think that's a wonderful mantra. It does raise a question though for me, taking the perspective of those who feel behind, which is when you say just let things unfold, for how long and how do I know if I'm doing a good job? Yeah.

Yeah, okay. That's a fair question. I think we all use a barometer of what's around us. I mean, I'm lying to say I just sat there and said, oh, look at all these people getting promoted. You know, isn't that nice? Not me. That would not have been the answer to that. So my kind of philosophy, though, had been, and it stems back to where I grew up, because my father abandoned our family when I was young.

I was 16, my brothers and sisters were younger, and I happened to walk into the garage and I heard the conversation. Just a coincidence. I heard him tell my mother he could care less what happened to her or any of us, and she could work out on the street for all he cared. My mom didn't cry. She was 34 years old. She had four kids. She had not a day of education past high school, never worked a day outside the home. We immediately were on financial aid, food stamps, going to lose our house.

And she was just really determined that's not how this story could end. I would take care of the family. She would go back, get a little bit of education, get a job, a little more, a little better job. Never did get a degree. When you say, okay, but how do you judge where you're going? For me in my life, that set the bar for bad, that nothing could ever be that bad again.

So anything from here now looks really good to me. And that feeling is really freeing and liberating because I would go on in life to do really hard things and in the moment think, oh my God, if this doesn't work, I would always remember it's never as bad as that was. Part of my shield would be we could never cause my mom trouble. So we had to study. It's like, we can't cause her problems. Do your homework, you know, because she's got enough.

And my sisters and brothers are all very successful as well. My mom would go, what did I ever do? And we just observed, right? And to us and my great grandma and grandma who all had tragedies, we learned hard work

took you to a better place. I know that maybe sounds like so simple that there was always a way forward and hard work would make that happen. And so as life would go on and, you know, you go to school and work and everything else, I think buried deep down was that thought that, look, hard work usually leads to another better place. However, I would say that's completely naive if that's the only thing you think about, right? You know, I can remember as time would go on,

I would start to say, well, now wait a second. If I was just as good as that person, why did this not happen? And I learned to start then being an advocate for myself. Well, that goes to the topic of your book, which is power. Your view of power is not necessarily one that's been dominant in corporate America for generations. And maybe to tee this up, I want to read you just an excerpt from an email that I got yesterday. This is from...

One of the most senior executives in all of tech who's had a lot of impact on the world, and I suspect you know this person, but I won't identify. Quote. If you said he or she, that would narrow it down, you know? Not giving you any clues, Jenny. Not one. Here it is. Ready? Quote. The average employee in corporate America just wants to get paid for shirking. Most employees in corporate America need bosses who are monitoring their performance, watching them, seeing them, and grading them to ensure they work hard.

What would you say to that executive? I would say, "I hope I never have to work for them," is what I would say, because I do not believe that is what the normal person out there in anybody's team looks like. Not in a hundred years do I believe that. I don't believe it was the past and I don't believe it is this moment. In this moment in time particularly, my view of leadership is that people want someone who is going to be respectful in leadership, do not govern by fear. I've lived through many times when it was fear.

It's not sustainable. And it ends up being the power of me, we, and us. Because I kind of learned in my life, I'm like, you know, my mom had power when she had nothing else. She had power. I hope I can inspire people to believe that they had some power. You have something when you have nothing else. And then you start to impact people. And then eventually you might be able to impact society. Do you guys want to work for the person who wrote that email? Hands up.

The ones who wanted to be CEO do? Three of them want to be that executive. Seriously, what do you think of that answer? Do you believe that? No, of course not. What do you think of it? Well, I'll tell you what I wrote back to the executive last night, which was there's zero evidence that what you say is true, but there are a lot of managers who operate that way, and projection bias is alive and well. Oh.

Okay, that's a very good answer. You should be an author or a professor. No, seriously, that is a good answer because I think the most valuable things I learned from good people I work from was to make decisions based on values and treat people that way. I hope one day you either create a company or you are lucky enough to work in one that is really steeped in values. Because I think some of the issues we see today are companies that their values aren't too deep. And just like when the wind blows on a tree without deep roots, they sway with the wind. And

I can remember one of my very first bosses, I was the first time now managing people. And I said, hey, I have a guy that's telling really bad jokes, misogynistic jokes, and people are starting to complain. And he's a top performer. He said, you tell him to stop or you fire him right now. He's like, I don't even understand this conversation. Leadership by values is

And creating followership that way, you know, says a whole lot more than what you just described, managed by process. It certainly does. I think where, for me, it gets really challenging is that sounds to me like a broken definition of performance to begin with. If you're causing people that kind of discomfort, then you shouldn't be considered a high performer in the first place. Yeah, I agree with you. I couldn't agree more. Why do you think these notions of power are still pervasive?

This was what was starting to bother me that people, I would talk to a lot of people and I'd say, would you like to be powerful? And the answer would be, no, but I, no, I would rather work on really important things. This is why I ended up with the book.

The irony is you need power to work on really important things. I wasn't comfortable leading those other ways. And I learned these other ways from lots of people that I became a mosaic of, right? And you know what? I really feel like we're changing society too now. Working in that way, and it's such a divided world. So to me, in this moment in time, it was why I thought maybe I could persuade a few more people that it's okay to lead this way. So what are your basic principles of good power?

The first one is, can you be in service of something? Can you decide what you are in service of? The second thing is, if you want to do something hard, then you've got to realize you've got to build belief constantly. And that is a job of head and heart. Like, I've got to convince you to go somewhere you don't necessarily want to go voluntarily. So that head to heart thing, I had to learn about how to appeal to people's heads and their hearts at the same time. And it can mean you have to be brutally honest. But I'm talking to your heart, and I understand at the same time what I'm doing.

And then the third thing is know what must change and what must endure. Most people are really in a hurry to change everything. And I don't mean endure means you don't modernize it. But I've made big mistakes when I didn't think about what should endure. And I didn't work on how work got done versus what work got done. People like, oh, I built this. I made this. I did this. But back to that guy and those people working at him, you know,

How they work has got like so much more to do with what comes out the other end. And then the last two are going to sound asynchronous. And I wrote this way before ChatGPT. You need to steward good tech. Put bluntly, you need to manage the upsides and the downsides of technology at the same time. We do not do that.

And the fifth one is be resilient. Because I guarantee if you go work on something hard, let me tell you what, there is no straight line to heaven. I want to zoom in on a few of those principles and how you practice them. I love the one about focusing on what's going to endure, not just what's going to change. And right around when you were writing the book, actually, Don Van Nippenberg right across the street was publishing some research showing that people are more willing to go along with change if you tell them what will stay the same. I think the message is so often missed of here's the new vision, here's the new strategy. But

Here's our DNA that's going to stick. Here are the values and principles that are not going to change. So can you give us some examples of how you did that? In 2012, when I took over, there was cloud, there was social, there was mobile, there was data. Usually tech's got one big thing happening, and it can go a decade. No, no, no. All at once. And we were really taking the benefit of a past model and not prepared for a future model. So that is my moment to start in that.

And therefore, the pressure of become something else is so high. I can remember like the very first cover comes out on me, it says, will IBM ever be cool again? And so, oh, welcome. And so that idea in the pressure is so intense to be all these other things. I would come to call it chasing shiny objects. And so what would be an example of that? To Adam's point, this idea of know what you are at your core,

And particularly you have to change the idea that people can hang on to something they know while the winds will whip. And of course, everyone's like, well, you got to be just like a consumer cloud. And OK, you're running off and tons of money and trying to go there until, I mean, we're 10 years behind on that. And you realize that, wait a second, wait a second, what are we? You know, we are an enterprise company. I'm not a consumer facing company. I no longer even had consumer products.

And so to realize, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What are we? What are we? And it would take us down the path to understand we were a hybrid cloud. We understood big companies. We knew the journey they would take. No, we were not that consumer cloud. We were this. That is what we were. And to be comfortable in that. And I was so focused on speed. I'd be like telling everyone, come on, guys, we got to go faster. We got to go faster. We got to change. We got to change. Come on. I was a couple, maybe a couple of years in, I had this epiphany.

I was like, okay, why isn't that going faster? It would become really clear to me. And I have a big company, half a million people, right? So I'm like, if I don't do something to change how work gets done, and that's what leadership determines. I'm like, they're not saying, oh, let's be slow. Please, let's be slow. The teams know they want to go faster, but who puts these processes in place about how stuff gets done or what they have to check or no clear decisions or da, da, da. I felt so bad, and I apologized to the workforce. I was like, man, I realize, like,

This is leadership's job to get stuff out of your way, all right? And that means new tools. That means new ways of working. That means design thinking, agile. That means small teams. This is our job, not yours. I hope one day you always remember that lesson about

how work got done. And that would take me down a whole big old journey of agile, design thinking, net promoter scores, focus on skills. That would end up being probably my most enduring legacy of what I would leave behind was a foundation that could weather change.

That goes to your point about building belief. So I can only imagine being in your shoes at IBM saying to a bunch of techies and engineers, we're going to do design thinking. How did you get people excited about that? Yeah, that was a problem. But well-intended because people really believed in their products. And if you do mission-critical work, you really do care if stuff doesn't break and it's secure as could be. So you start building from the inside out.

and you move outward from there because you get this very complex thing right and you move out. And the last person to touch your product is the consumer who's buying it, okay? So, 'cause you build outward. That's like how engineers think. And so this was a world where, uh-uh, you gotta start on the outside and come in. But nobody did design on that scale. And I remember we hired a fella and I said to him, okay,

I believe this thing about design thinking in that, you know, all these, it doesn't matter if we get all this great stuff out, if nobody can ever use it or want it, you know, so we've got to get this in. And I said, what do you think we need to get started? He goes, if you think you're going to be able to do this with like a couple hundred people, you're nuts.

I said, "Well, what do you think I need?" He said, "I think I need like one or two thousand to start." We did these pilgrimages. We started with teams of multidisciplinary five and ten at a time to this kind of a religious experience about design thinking. In a year we got to two thousand, and then in two and three years we were at ten and twenty thousand, and soon we trained a hundred thousand. It was like brick at a time of teaching. And they'd have to go in, they'd get homework, they'd have to come back.

It is like hard work to do change. I think that was the part I was trying to convey, like it's science to get people to embrace and change and believe. But then they started to see it and they saw customer reactions. That's how you do it. A few years ago, Rob Cross and I made a call for a chief collaboration officer role in companies because we looked at all these organizations that only succeed if people are able to become more than the sum of their parts and seeing how many organizations were less than the sum of their parts.

And the question was, who's managing the relationships, the communication, the silo busting between people? And the answer is, no one. No one is managing it. And so I think you're onto something. That's why I kind of end the book in a personal letter. And I say, always remember that how you do your work just might be remembered more than what you do. Okay, lightning wise, tell me the worst career advice you've ever gotten. When someone told me, just do a good job and the rest will happen. You do have to advocate for yourself.

and the way you're comfortable doing that. Okay. What's something you've rethought in the last couple of years? I am trying to spend more time with my family, my husband. Yeah. Someone once told me they were writing a book that when people retire, the name of the book would be called, I don't know if they're ever writing it or not, 20 Summers, that you have about 20 summers left. And that if you did, what would you do with your life?

and if you really thought of it that way. Now, you're far from that, most of you, but that thought, so what am I doing? You know, it's like work on the things that are most important. So that's what I've rethought. Leader you admire most outside of IBM? Do you know Shirley Jackson? She just stepped down as a leader of RPI, but she was the first black woman to ever get a PhD out of MIT. She is a force of nature. What's a book you think everyone in the room should read that you did not author? Hmm.

One of the books Pope Francis wrote was a very good book. The point is to see the view from an entirely different perspective of what is leadership. I know there are some students in the audience who are going to benefit from what you're about to say. What is the most important reason that they should not go to banking or consulting but do tech instead? No, seriously. It teaches you how to problem solve.

No matter what you do in life, you will have a problem. And if you do something meaningful, it'll be a problem to solve. I wish I could get more people to go into tech and engineering for that reason. I felt that's what it taught me to do was problem solve,

You will be never frightened of a problem because you learn how to break it down. And by the way, like the biggest problems in the world, I say it requires systems thinking to solve them because they're so interrelated. Like all these things that are influencing something else and you need to be able to like step back and understand that. That's what engineers do, right? They break big complex things into digestible things. Long before anyone knew what ChatGPT was, you had Project Debater. You had Watson. You had...

all kinds of AI and we're not letting the public see most of what you were doing. So we didn't know how scared we should be. How terrified are you on a scale from frightened to panicked? I am not frightened of the technology. I am more frightened if we will learn from the past and if we can build trust in the technology. AI has been in and out of its winters for decades, right? And

I thought too, by the way, in 2012, 13, this was the moment, but I really learned some hard lessons that we're going to learn again. This is why I'm so focused on this idea of managing the upside and downside of technology at once. Like our job is to usher it safely into the world, not just build it. And those of us build it, bigger responsibility, but everybody uses it now, right? Like I'm on some big bank boards and all, and I'm like, okay, you're in a hurry to put it out there. Okay, trust is your premium. To me, this moment in time, the question is not,

The technology, the question is around people and trust is how I feel so strongly. And what I learned when Watson was, and is still IBM's AI technology, but we chose to try it in one of the most difficult areas. We went over oncology and medical first. What I learned was your tolerance for technology in a really important area like healthcare is way different. You expect zero problem. And then a doctor works around the clock. He's like, okay, this is like one more thing I have to add to my work is technology.

And so I would start to see all these issues that had nothing to do with technology. And then how it's trained is what you're seeing in chat very well in this kind of AI. You know, it's trained by humanity. It's good and it's bad, right? And then who owns the data? And like social media, we took all the upside till we realized there was downside, right? And I feel like with chat, these downsides are very evident right now. So great, let's work on the positive and let's please work on the negative at the same time. Like I think for your guys' business, education,

How do you think technology like chat and generative AI will change education? And what do you fear and what do you hope?

There's an old joke that we shouldn't try to predict the future because historians aren't even very accurate in predicting the past. True. So I say this with a lot of trepidation, but I think one of the things we've already seen is two randomized controlled experiments showing that if we give knowledge workers chat or a similar tool, they actually not only are more productive in writing, they're also producing higher quality writing. And this was a big shock for me, but it turns out what it allowed a lot of them to do was to overcome writer's block and

and spend less time on the rough drafting and more time on what humans do really well, which is idea generation and editing and revising.

And so I think you can immediately see, I mean, the number of term papers I would have finished earlier if these tools had existed when I was in college is sad to think about. But then I would have wasted just as much time rewriting them because I hate every word that these tools spit out. It's terrible. So could you decide when you're teaching how you would change how you teach because of it? I haven't had to yet. No, but when you come back and do it. I mean, for sure, we can't give essays as take-home assignments anymore. Yeah.

I think they're going to have to be done on site as tests, which to me defeats the whole purpose of writing, which is a great writer is not somebody who can on command produce Shakespeare, right? In four minutes, go, good luck. Yeah. Right? It's somebody who can actually master that craft and produce Shakespeare in a lifetime. And unfortunately, I don't think we have good workarounds for that. Can you solve that for me? Well, maybe now...

It's really going to go back to teaching critical thinking. You're going to take something and your job is going to be pull it apart, find the argument in it. Is it right? Is it wrong? How would you improve it? Like my positive side says, okay, does this mean now we're going to move from an era of education of facts to critical thinking? So maybe that's a good thing that can come out, but we got to manage that process to have it happen that way, right? And I super worry about

Other bad actors around the world feeding this thing with non-factual data to get it to do bad things. That's happening as we speak, big time. Like I worked on AI ethics guys for a decade and like nobody will listen to me on AI ethics.

I'm so sad about my non-persuasive capabilities. And by the way, Europe's kind of ahead on this topic, just like they were on GDPR, on data privacy. Yeah, why do you think you've had trouble getting through? Part of who you're talking AI ethics to is governments who don't understand. When you say ethics, it's like, wait, look, we have to make these technologies explainable. So I've tried to control technologies. Like when I'm like, oh my God, that one is like ahead of us, slow it down, impossible.

What I have learned, though, is maybe what you should regulate is how it's used. Not in itself, but how it's used. A lot of these technologies, other companies, people would protest. I don't want these used in military. No, no. Our view was if it was used in defense, it was okay. I wasn't going to make killing machines. I mean...

So the use, like if you had your phone on you, you would probably use your face to open it. Maybe you do. Maybe you don't trust it. You don't. Definitely don't. That's so interesting. Is it because you don't trust them to have your face? Yeah, I feel like my face is already in enough places. Is that what? Okay. Okay, well, all right.

I don't feel that way. I'm like, so much easier. But I don't think it should be used for racial profiling, right? So I'm like regulating the use already in my head of how this should happen. So why has it not been successful to date, all these attempts? I think like what I learned, everything's got its moment. You know what I mean?

I thought AI's moment would have been a decade ago. Well, now it's here. So now I think we'll come to terms with it and that we should learn from all these other technologies. That's interesting. I also think we have a framing problem, which is I think when you call it AI ethics, you've already lost. Yeah, very good point. Because everybody thinks they're ethical by their own moral compass. Fair enough. I think I would be much more persuaded if somebody brought to me AI safety. Yeah.

You know, excellent point. Call them principles of trust and transparency. It was what I actually call it in the book, yeah. I can get behind those. Okay, so give us your forecast. You made me make a prediction. Now I'm going to ask you for one. In what year are robots going to take many of our jobs? I think not...

in the foreseeable future. Look, every new technology comes along, it replaces some jobs. I think more likely than not, you'll be working with some kind of technology. - And I think this is one of the early lessons of your chess triumphs, right? - Yep, definitely. - That a human plus a computer could beat a computer. - Yep, I still believe that's where this heads, if we manage the downside.

Exciting. Okay, so this also goes to the work you're doing on skills. One point I didn't mention was access and aptitude, two different things. My mom had aptitude. She had no access. Okay, that will be forever in my brain. Time will go on. I had no access as a kid. I mean, it was by the grace of God of a scholarship in a school that said, if you can get in academically, we'll find you the money somehow, because I had no money. So,

Time will go on. I'm then become CEO. It's 2012. I'm trying to hire cyber people. And unemployment in this country is 10%. And we can't find people. I say, this is odd. You know, okay, what's that mean? Skill mismatch in the education system. So I go to a next meeting. Honest to God is how it happens. I go to the next meeting. It's corporate social responsibility. And they're like, hey, we got this one little school in Brooklyn. And it's a very poor neighborhood, Jen. And the community college, we're giving them a curriculum. They get an internship. And

We had a few jobs they could get in line for. If they come through, they get associate degree, no cost while they're in high school. Six-year high school, think of it. I said, well, interesting. We'll hire some people. Works out. Next year, I come back. I say, okay, how many did we hire? They're like, well, you know, like eight. I'm like, eight? They're doing so good. Well, 95% of our jobs require a PhD or a college degree. We prove after one year, same results. It's my team with...

degrees. And then we find, oh, more loyal, more attentive, and they're taking more follow-on education. Oh, by the way, 75% have now gone on to get degrees. And oh, by the way, we have our first PhD. And 95% are black and Hispanic. I've now worked with 100 of the biggest companies in the country. And of all good jobs, I would tell you 50% are over-credentialed, that you don't need a college degree to start if you wrote it for skill.

And it's like a strong belief that where you start should not determine where you end.

And I believe it so deeply. Instead of just buying talent, you've got to build it. By the way, I would come to learn this is good for everybody in the whole company. Like who doesn't want to be paid for skill and promoted for skill? - People in this room. - I hope you do too. - The people who won the pedigree lottery. - Yeah, well they did. I mean I learned the definition of privilege writing a book. And the fact that if you're in tech like me and the other guy up here, just the two of us, your skills have to change every three to five years.

And like, okay, like this is going to be a lifelong learning problem, right? So people got to be able to go back to school and there's policy changes that are easy. Not easy. Nothing in government's easy. Like I've witnessed perseverance. You can make these changes.

You're reminding me of one of our alums, Peter Blair, who studied what it means to be skilled through alternative routes and showed exactly what you're describing using econometric tools that requiring college degrees and advanced degrees systematically discriminates against people who have learned through vocational training, through internships and apprenticeships and returnships, through community college, and who have learned on the job.

And systematically, that closes doors on people who have not been lucky to be born into opportunity or privilege. And we are long overdue to change that. But I'm also trying to say to people, hey, your passion may be different than mine, OK? But I just really don't want you to give up on it. Because you might look at the world and go, oh, the political system's intractable. Nothing can get done. And I have just found, OK, yeah, it's hard. But it is all changeable. So I'm an optimist. I know that's

Maybe, maybe people aren't, but I am an optimist about, you know, how to get this. And I found that around the world, jobs are the greatest currency. There isn't a leader of a country I couldn't see, something I couldn't, if I could talk jobs, this is what everyone wants for their country. It's what you want for your children. It's what, you know, it's an interesting way to look at life that way. There are some questions about diversity here that I think are really important. First one is you broke one of the most durable glass ceilings on earth. What's your most important advice on how you did that?

Earlier, I was talking about this idea that growth and comfort never coexist, right? That idea, to me, as a woman, and I don't know why, I can't put my finger on this, right? But there's studies done, you probably can tell them to me, of every time there's an opportunity, women will give you the five reasons they can't do something, and a man might give you the five reasons he can do something. And that would finally come to roost with me, right, when I would get offered a job and

tell my boss, like I said, I had to go back and talk to my husband about it, a big, big job. And my husband said to me, do you think a man would answer the question that way, that I had to go back and talk to my husband?

And he was right. It wasn't just making a gender point, but this point that the biggest thing I could leave you with is that thought of embrace discomfort because it means you're learning something. So I would be hungry to get on more and more complex and difficult projects. It would become a sign of like, yes, the more nervous I get, that's so good because at the other end, something good comes out of it. It's what led me to all my preparation in life. It's all because I'm like, God, if it's something I didn't know and now I know something, it's

I'm better each time. And so I would go from being afraid of change to looking for change. And that when I wasn't nervous, I'd be starting to get, oh, this is not good. This means I'm learning nothing. And it would be time to change. Around the world, I would talk to women about this. In fact, people thought I should have named the book that. Growth and comfort will never coexist.

And that would be my biggest piece of advice. That is some twisted Pavlovian conditioning right there. I'm going to wire myself so that I only feel good when I feel bad. Yes, it is true. But I don't know. You think about it. When have you ever learned the most? How did you feel? Usually uncomfortable.

And so if you can do that, you will be surprised where it'll take you. And then there's another question here about you spent your whole career in one company. That is not the norm anymore. Do you think there's still a case to be made for that kind of loyalty? Or if you were in all of our students' shoes, would you do something different? When you guys run something, I think the case is I would say to people, hey, I have to earn your decision to stay here every time.

as a company. And I stayed in one place because I pivoted so many times after I could get used to that discomfort thing, okay? I felt I did work 12 places. I went from being an engineer, I then was into marketing, I then built a consulting group, I then worked in software. I mean, I had all these careers, but I had the benefit of the same network around me, right? So I felt I could do that. So I would say to people, "Yeah, there's benefit, but the company has to earn your desire to stay there."

And the other thing I would say is, you know, some of you look at what your next step is. Even when I ever thought of leaving, I always ask myself the question, am I running from something or am I running to something?

And so when you think about where you'll work, you'll answer those questions. And it'll have to be something aligned. Like I always wanted to do something that would do something important and have meaning and impact something. It doesn't mean it had to be a big company. For me, it was technology to do that because I did go work at General Motors for a while. I felt so loyal after they helped me pay my education. It was such a big number. And I say to Mary, who's my friend now, I said, Mary, like I tried, but I learned at a really tender age, there was a difference between a career and a job.

This was a job to me because I wasn't in love with cars. I was working on buses, by the way. And so that idea that you get to do something at some point that you are really got some strong passion about is so important. That's why you'll stay one place. I had passion that technology could make your and my life better. I didn't get to work on that every minute, by the way. You know, that's not how life is. That's unrealistic. But I did a lot of the time.

Well, your passion is palpable. I think it's safe to say we would all be lucky to work with someone as passionate as you are. Can't thank you enough for coming to join us today. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quinn, Benben Cheng, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. This episode was fact-checked by Mateus Salas. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Original music by Hansel Su and Alison Leighton-Brown. How many want to be CEO know already of something?

That's interesting. Who's willing to admit it is the hands you got. There are at least twice as many. Okay, shut your eyes so just Adam and I can see who. Okay, show us again. Aspiring CEOs, that's maybe triple. Yeah, okay. Okay, put your hands down. Now you can open. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, okay, it is like maybe a third, right, that had their hands up. So I think that's kind of good because let life unfold.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.