When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.
What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.
I've made lots of mistakes. Probably the worst one - I would say they tie. It's either when I didn't move fast enough on something, or I didn't take a big enough risk.
If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.
When you're on a scale like we are in 170 countries and hundreds of thousands of people, you have a single point of view.
I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.
We should prepare our future workforce differently. It isn't just advanced STEM degrees. There are many jobs you can do without advanced degrees.
With this emergence of big data and social mobility, you will, in fact, see the death of 'average,' Instead, you will see the era of you.
If you ask me, 'So what is your business model?' Our business model's always about shifting to higher value opportunities.
Clients say, 'What's your strategy,' and I say, 'Ask me what I believe first.' That's a far more enduring answer.