Ginni Rometty

Virginia Rometty (born July 29, 1957) is an American business executive who was executive chairman of IBM after stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020. She was previously chairman, president and CEO of IBM, becoming the first woman to head the company. She retired from IBM on December 31, 2020, after a near-40 year career there. Before becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she first joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and subsequently headed global sales, marketing, and strategy.

While general manager of IBM's global services division, in 2002 she helped negotiate IBM's purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' IT consulting business, becoming known for her work integrating the two companies. As CEO, she focused IBM on analytics, cloud computing, and cognitive computing systems.

Rometty's tenure as IBM's CEO was marked by awards including by Bloomberg's 50 Most Influential People in the World, Fortune's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business", Time's 20 Most Important People in Tech and Forbes' America's Top 50 Women In Tech. Her tenure was also met by fierce criticism relating to executive compensation bonuses, layoffs, outsourcing, and presiding over 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.

Ginni Rometty was born on July 29, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, as Virginia Nicosia. Growing up outside Chicago, she was the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family. Her parents divorced and her father left when she was fifteen years old, and her mother subsequently took on multiple jobs to support the family while Rometty looked after the household in the evenings.

She began attending Northwestern University in Illinois in 1975 on a scholarship from General Motors, where she interned between her junior and senior years. Rometty was also a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, eventually becoming its president. She graduated with high honors from the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in 1979, receiving a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering. She has received honorary doctoral degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2014) and Northwestern University (2015). She also received an honorary degree from North Carolina State University.

After graduation in 1979, Rometty went to work for General Motors Institute in Flint, where she was responsible for application and systems development. In 1981 she joined IBM as a systems analyst and systems engineer in Detroit. Initially working with clients in the insurance industry, she spent her first ten years at IBM in technical positions. The New York Times writes that she "quickly moved up to a series of management jobs", where she worked with clients in insurance, banking, telecommunications, manufacturing and health care. She spent the 1990s working in sales, and by the late 1990s was helping clients such as Prudential Financial, Inc. with their internet features. She joined IBM's Consulting Group in 1991.

While general manager of IBM's global services division, in 2002 she championed and helped negotiate the purchase of Monday, the consulting arm of the professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. The acquisition was the "largest in professional services history" and launched IBM in the services business. While senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, Rometty then received her "big break" at IBM when she was given the task of integrating PricewaterhouseCoopers and its consultants with IBM. In 2002, Time named her in its 2002 Global Business Influential list. From 2005 until 2009, she was the senior vice president of Global Business Services at IBM, and she also became senior vice president of Enterprise Business Services-IBM Global Services in July 2005. Among other roles, she was general manager of IBM Global Services, Americas, as well as general manager of IBM's Global Insurance and Financial Services Sector. She was also a managing partner at IBM Business Consulting Services, Inc. and general manager of Insurance Industry Group. She received the Carl Sloane Award 2006 from the Association of Management Consulting Firms.

Laid out by Rometty and other IBM executives, in 2007 IBM announced a five-year growth plan concerning revenue growth and capital allocation. Among other strategies, the "2015 Roadmap" outlined moving IBM away from the hardware industry to focus on businesses such as software and services. She became senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy in 2009, focusing on the company's "fast-growing analytics unit". In January 2009, she was placed in charge of IBM's sales force, as senior vice president of global sales and distribution until 2010. During this time, she pushed the development of IBM's growth-markets unit, which had been created in 2008 to focus on emerging markets such as Brazil and Vietnam. From 2010 until 2012 she was an IBM senior vice president, and from 2010 until 2012, she was IBM's Group Executive of Sales, Marketing & Strategy. In 2011, CNN reported that she was "credited with spearheading IBM's growth strategy by getting the company into the cloud computing and analytics businesses. She was also at the helm of readying Watson, the Jeopardy! playing computer, for commercial use."