I always say, you know, if I sit here and close my eyes and say, 'When did I learn the most in my life, in my career?' It'll always be when I close them and everything I think of is when I took a risk. It's when I think I learned the most.

Clients say, 'What's your strategy,' and I say, 'Ask me what I believe first.' That's a far more enduring answer.

To me, I learned along the way, you know, culture is behavior. That's all it is; culture is people's behaviors.

Never love something so much that you can’t let go of it.

And the reason I came to IBM was I think - I always say at a really early age, I learned you've got to be passionate about what you do. No matter what it is, you put too much, your heart and soul in it, you have to be passionate about it. You make too many sacrifices.

Every day I get to 'Think' and work on everything from digitizing electric grids so they can accommodate renewable energy and enable mass adoption of electric cars, helping major cities reduce congestion and pollution, to developing new micro-finance programs that help tiny businesses get started in markets such as Brazil, India, Africa.

One thing I always think about in making a market, and it again is something I have learned from Sam [Palmisano] as well, he always says, "Be first and be lonely."