Business Superhero: Ginni Rommety

9 Jun 2016

When it comes to the most powerful and influential women of all time, so often we hear about the Beyonces or Victoria Beckhams of the world.

Now there’s no denying that these female professionals have clearly become successful and are tremendous at what they do – with billions in the bank and millions of social media followers to prove it.

Saying that, most of the team here at OpenCRM aren’t exactly drama queens (although we’ve got a few—you know who you are!), they’re much more of the quiet, “getting-on-with-it” type of employee. And that’s one of the things that really drew me to this month’s Business Superhero.

Ginni Rommety, CEO of IBM since 2012, isn’t one of these big name, flashy CEOs. She isn’t featured on celebrity talk shows or sharing selfies on social media (not that we have anything against a good celeb CEO selfie!). Rommety, by all accounts, is a very private and incredibly dedicated person.

She started out at IBM back in 1981 when she was only 24 and worked her way up from systems engineer, spending some time in sales and marketing, before finally taking over as its first female CEO. Rommety took over when the company was in a sticky situation with a serious decline in turnover over the last decade. And it’s been no easy feat to turn this failing company into one of the market leading beast it once was.

My own personal admiration of Ginni Rommety is not just her business acumen and clear success, it’s that she started out at IBM in a junior position in her early twenties and worked her way up to the top. She achieved all of this through hard work and loyalty to a company that she clearly loves and believes in deeply.

When you read the (handful) of personal interviews she’s granted, you can tell that she’s stayed at IBM because she believes in what they’re trying to do and wants to be a part of it.

And it’s this dedication and hard work that has made her our June Business Superhero.