3 Surprising Facts We Learned About IBM from CEO Ginni Rometty

You can ask IBM CEO Ginni Rometty who she is voting for in November, but she’s not going to tell you. That’s one of the tidbits we gleaned from a recent interview with Rometty that ran on Bloomberg Businessweek.

IBM’s first female CEO has been working at the company since 1981, and has a lot of insights into how the century-old company is poised to continue transforming along with the demands of technology. 

Here are three things we learned about IBM:

1. Supporting Diversity Pays Off 

It is one thing for a company to talk about diversity, but it is quite another to put it into practice. (For some ideas on how to do that, see 5 Ways to Start Improving Diversity in Your Tech Company Today.) At IBM, one of the concrete examples of this is the company shipping breast milk for women employees who have just had children and who travel. “It’s a big deal to keep women in the workforce,” Rometty says. 

2. Being Seen as Serious Helps Attract Talent 

Sometimes in tech it seems that the best talent is only attracted to the fun, sexy companies. But that’s not all true, Rometty says. 

“People from Google and Facebook come here because they really want to have an impact on serious things,” Rometty says. “We are trusted with clients’ most valuable data. We are trusted with their most valuable processes. So that is why people come here. It’s why they stay. We get almost a million and a half applications a year. We still have the very best picks.”

3. Looking for a Math Ph.D? You’ll Probably Find Them at IBM

According to Rometty, IBM takes “10 percent of the world’s Ph.D.s in math.” Whoa. 

“[T]here will be a new way of computing, and it’s going to be driven by this huge amount of data. It’s going to transform industries, and it will change the way the IBMer works,” she says. 

Check out the full interview here.