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

Every now and then, a technology comes along that is so profound, so powerful, so universal, that its impact will change everything. It will transform every institution in the world. It will create winners and losers, will change the way we do business, the way we teach our children, communicate and interact as individuals.

You can never be comfortable with your success, you've got to be paranoid you're going to lose it.

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.

I think values are really, really important, but I also think that too many values are just words.

No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.

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