Issue No. 551 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a master class in leadership from Ginni Rometty, IBM’s former Chairman and CEO. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 550 book reviews, and click here for the Zoom Review of The Four Workarounds with David Schmidt and Jason Pearson. (Plus, listen to Episode 4 of The Discerning Leader Podcast below.)
Pop Quiz! What would you do in your first 100 days to set the tone as IBM’s new leader?
Master Class in Leadership
I know. I know. I confess that sometimes I will overuse glowing adjectives and not-so-clever rhetorical tools to inspire (or guilt) you into reading a book—but please believe me—my heart is in the right place. My book reviewer’s lexicon often oozes with…
• Must-read!
• Page-turner!
• Buy 2 books!
• Can’t-stop-talking-about-it!
• A leader’s leader—yet stunningly transparent!
Well…here we go again. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. This is a very special book. And yes, you better buy two copies to share with your team.
Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World,
by Ginni Rometty
Ginni Rometty, the former Chairman and CEO of IBM (2012-2020) traveled through 10 jobs, for almost 40 years—in just one company!—and her up-close-and-personal reflections deliver rich and meaningful reading. It’s a coaching class. Actually, it’s a master class.
If Harvard Business Review Press had asked me to title this book, I might have suggested: Good Person, or Good Leader, or All-Around Good. Rometty is not yet a saint (especially to those who lost their jobs via tough calls from the CEO office), but I was struck with the depth and breadth of this master class on leadership. Examples:
MASTER CLASS #1: FIRST 100 DAYS. Beginning as a systems engineer with IBM in 1981—and serving in a wide variety of challenging roles, Ginni Rometty was named IBM’s CEO in 2012. At the time, she was one of just 19 women who were leading a Fortune 500 company (there are 53 today).
Pop Quiz! You’re IBM’s ninth CEO and first female CEO in 100 years! You’re following some industry and leadership giants like Thomas Watson, Sr. (1914-1956) and Thomas Watson, Jr. (1956-1971) who later served as ambassador to the Soviet Union under Jimmy Carter. (So what would you do in your first 100 days to set the tone as IBM’s new leader?)
Chapter 7, “Building Belief” (one of her five leadership principles) is a fascinating case study for new CEOs (and the boards that select new leaders). Good stuff (like her definition of “good power” pops up throughout this very helpful book). Examples:
• Upon being named CEO (two months before her start date), she immediately made 20 phone calls—“the people whose influence had been instrumental to this moment,” including one leader “who had promoted me to my first management position and taught me so much about leading with values.”
• She also called former IBM CEOs, including John Akers (1985-1993) and Lou Gerstner (1993-2002), and half a dozen clients, plus family, friends, and current direct reports. (What 20 names would be on your call list?)
• For her worldwide broadcast to IBMers on her first day as CEO, Rometty intentionally positioned herself at IBM’s primary research labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.—“because research had long been our company’s differentiator,” a key belief she’d championed for years. Strategically, she was counting on the almost 3,500 researchers at IBM to lead the reinvention of their innovation engine.
• And imagine this! For her first worldwide video broadcast, “I stood in front of the group, no slides, no charts. Just me and them.” She leveraged stories to champion what she titled their three Strategic Beliefs and “Being Essential from Day One.”
• No easy task! “My goal was to come out of the gate with a balance of optimism and realism, to paint reality and give hope.” She’s very transparent that her nine years at the helm were not all smooth sailing.
What would you do and say on your first day as CEO of a worldwide organization that today has around 300,000 employees in 170 countries? Yikes!
MASTER CLASS #2: LEARNING TO LEARN. Oh, my! Chapter 4, “Learning to Learn,” is now required reading for my four teenage granddaughters and one grandson. I’ve told them often how critical it is to interview the boss before taking a job. Insights:
• Ginni Rometty was given her first management position in 1987 and her boss “taught me how to manage people by how he managed me.”
• “During my second full year of working for Pat, my team averaged twenty-five days of formal education, which was 60 percent more class time than IBM required.”
• On creating a culture: “When Pat first joined the company, he was once sent home for wearing a light-yellow shirt instead of a white one!”
• Rometty’s vulnerability makes her story even more real and readable. Read the uncomfortable conversation she had with her manager. “Pat was talking about my weight.” (That talk ain’t gonna happen in 2023! Oh, my.)
• To her direct reports, she was a “nitpicky editor” and they nicknamed her Ginni “Red Pen” Rometty.” More than once, she writes, “I received a red pen as a gift.”
• The time management theme oozes throughout the entire book, including the time a client asked for her highlighted notes—rather than sitting through her boring presentation!
• A former colleague and “astute strategist” coached her, “Know what makes you great, because IBM would make a horrible Google, just as Google would make a horrible IBM.”
MASTER CLASS #3: LEADERSHIP AXIOMS. When you buy two copies, you better buy two red pens also. You’ll underline the leadership insights and axioms on dozens of pages.
• “I was developing a propensity for continuous learning…”
• “Everyone had something to teach and I didn’t always wait for a mentor to find me.”
• “Over the years, I established a mosaic of mentors and tried to become a composite of their best behaviors.”
• “I also was becoming a ‘T-shaped’ professional, developing a breadth but also a depth of knowledge in a particular area.”
• “In essence, I was learning the value of learning.”
“Knowledge, however, is not enough. In researching this book, I read over performance reviews from my first years at IBM.” She adds, “Rereading the appraisals reminded me just how much people value seemingly simple acts…
• “like being prepared,
• being on time,
• being responsive,
• keeping others informed so they’re never surprised,
• or just having a positive attitude, especially under stress.
• Reliability.
• Dependability.
• Initiative.
• Anticipating problems and addressing them before they fester.”
“These are all things people appreciate. And when all else was equal, I think professionalism helped me stand out.”
There’s so much more. Why Rometty wrote 100 handwritten thank-you notes before a big meeting. Why when other U.S. company executives were fleeing Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, she promptly flew into Tokyo. And why, on her first day as CEO, she sent letters to each of IBM’s senior vice presidents “describing three things I admired about them.” In some cases, “I articulated ways I thought they could grow.”
And certainly the acquisition (she called it a “merger”) of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ consulting division deserves its own master class status. Her plan? “I immediately assembled a transition team of three hundred people from each business, and for six weeks everyone hunkered down in offices and hotel ballrooms to get acquainted and figure out what a combined organization would look like.” (Oh, my—to be a fly on the wall, or even the guy tasked with cleaning up the meeting rooms each day. “Wow! Look what’s on this flip chart!”)
Full Disclosure! I must admit that Good Power touched a few emotional buttons for me. My oldest brother, Paul (1939-2015) launched his career at IBM in 1961 in San Jose, Calif., and then true to IBM’s internal slogan (“I’ve Been Moved”) also worked for the company in Boulder, Colo.
A classic white-shirt engineer, Paul was an invaluable mentor to me, especially in my CEO years. (I still own IBM stock.) Visit the Systems Bucket here to read my tribute to Paul when, at a CMA national convention in Nashville, he mentored a team of volunteers in “process management” and how to leverage a “just-in-time production assembly line.” He was a true IBM systems guy!
Thank you, IBM, and thank you, Ginni Rometty, for this master class in “leading positive change in our lives, work, and world.”
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World, by Ginni Rometty. Listen on Libro (9 hours, 24 minutes). And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) When Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was the chairman and CEO of IBM (1914 to 1956), a sales rep flubbed a $1 million government bid and immediately submitted his resignation to Watson. After discussing the series of mistakes—and what the sales rep would do differently the next time—Watson refused to accept the resignation, noting, “Why would I accept this when I just invested one million dollars in your education?” (Read the full story in Mistake #1 in Mastering Mistake-Making.) What’s the “mistake culture” in our organization? Do we celebrate and learn from our mistakes?
2) Ginny Rometty writes that her first boss at IBM had both gravitas and a high degree of what we now call emotional intelligence. “His ability to combine soft and hard leadership styles is an essence of good power.” For more on this, read my review of The Softer Side of Leadership: Essential Soft Skills That Transform Leaders and the People They Lead, by Eugene B. Habecker. So…in our organization, how effectively do we leverage both soft and hard leadership styles?
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 3: The Mount Rushmore of Leadership Legends
Book #22 of 100: The Motive
For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #22 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.
THE MOTIVE: Why So Many Leaders
Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities
by Patrick M. Lencioni
Books #22 through #40 spotlight 19 books I named to “The Mount Rushmore of Leadership Legends” group—featuring Patrick Lencioni, Jim Collins, Ken Blanchard, and Peter Drucker. We’ll start with the first of Lencioni’s best four—and his insights will shock you. (Don’t skip a page.) He calls for “the end of servant leadership.”
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: The Motive
• Listen on Libro (2 hours, 37 minutes).
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson)
Lencioni writes, “If someone were to dive into a stack of my books for the first time, I’d tell them to start with this one.” This “leadership fable” business story, plus end-of-the-book lessons, has a new twist—and it’s not subtle. The poke-in-the-rib: Why do you want to be a leader? It’s a must-read.
The Discerning Leader Podcast, Ep. 4 (3/16/2023)
Listen to The Discerning Leader Podcast as Steve Macchia and Matt Scott, from Leadership Transformations, and John Pearson dialogue on the 10 phases of a spiritual discernment process—from Steve’s book, The Discerning Life: An Invitation to Notice God in Everything (John’s 2022 Book-of-the-Year). Click here for Season 25, Episode 4, "Faith-filled Conclusions (Phases 8, 9, 10)," A Process for Discernment (March 16, 43 minutes).
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THE FUTURE NORMAL
I did not ask AI to write this review. I was tempted, but I wrote this review the old-fashioned way. This must-read on 30 trends (including "Augmented Creativity") will be a great resource for your planning teams. Read The Future Normal: How We Will Live, Work and Thrive in the Next Decade, by Rohit Bhargava and Henry Coutinho-Mason. Click here to read my review. And read more book reviews on the Pails in Comparison blog.
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PEARPOD | TELLING YOUR STORY. Do your marketing and communication teams have “a propensity for continuous learning?” We can point you to the latest trends, TED talks, podcasts, audio resources, coaches, mentors, and even those resources some still call “books.” Contact Jason Pearson at Pearpod (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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