IBM’S GINNI ROMETTY

The DealBook Conferences are hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is a financial columnist for The New York Times. DealBook started in 2001 as a newsletter about deal making and Wall Street. It has then become one of the most internationally respected business blogs. Now it’s also a very interesting event. Sorkin, by the way, is also the author of “Too Big To Fail”, an excellent book I recommend (and very good HBO movie as well) and more recently co-creator of the TV series Billions.

The conferences bring together leading figures in finance and experts from different industries, to give their opinion on the big challenges and opportunities ahead.

In this video, Sorkin interviews Ginni Rometty, chairwoman, president and CEO of the 106-year-old behemoth IBM. In this conversation she explains her vision of the future and how IBM manages to not only remain relevant, but to stay ahead, at the forefront of innovation. IBM is a hugely relevant company. It offers IT infrastructure and consulting services from nanotechnology to mainframe computers, it conducts important research, it provides cloud computing, cognitive computing, commerce, data and analytics, Internet of Things and mobile. It runs every bank in China, where they also help the government deal with enormous challenges like pollution. It handles 20 billion cybersecurity incidents per day. By any measure, IBM is one of the most important companies in the world. Ginni Rometty is responsible for 380,000 employees in more than a 170 countries.

So, this is what a powerful businesswoman sounds like…