I think that my leadership style is to get people to fear staying in place, to fear not changing.

If CEO compensation was performance-driven, which I believe it was in IBM's case, nobody would ever argue. If the shareholders didn't make billions and billions of dollars, I wouldn't make millions of dollars. My salary was the same for 10 years. It was all performance-based.

The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

Vision is easy. It's so easy to just point to the bleachers and say I'm going to hit one over there. What's hard is saying, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work.

It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.

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