30 Surprising Facts Everyone Should Know About Ginni Rometty

28 January 2019, 2:37 pm EST By Ruby Karnick

Ginni Rometty, the current chair, president, and CEO of IBM, is the very first woman to head the company, who actually joined the company as a systems engineer in 1981. Here are some very interesting facts about the American business executive:

She, as the CEO of IBM, has received many noteworthy awards including Bloomberg's "50 Most Influential People in the World," and Time's "20 Most Important People in Tech."
She has been ranked as one among the "Most Powerful Women in the World," by Forbes, since 2012. She was also named as one among the "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by the magazine. She was featured in the PBS documentary "The Boomer List," in the year 2014. The same year she was also ranked among the "World's 100 Most Powerful People" by Forbes.
Her tenure as the CEO is faced with fierce criticism relating to executive compensation bonuses, layoffs, outsourcing, along with over 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
She has been listed since 2005 in the Fortune's list of "50 Most Powerful Women in Business," and has even been ranking in the top 10 since 2010.
Publications such as Motley Fool, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and 24/7 Wallstreet, have named her as one among the worst CEOs.
Ginni Rometty was born as Virginia Marie Nicosia, on July 29, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois. She is the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family.
When she was around fifteen years old, her father left the following her parents got divorced. To support the family, her mother had to take on multiple jobs, which led to Rometty looking after the household in the evenings.
In the year 1975, she went to Northwestern University in Illinois, from where she graduated with high honors from the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
She attended Northwestern University in Illinois through a scholarship from General Motors, where she had interned between her junior and senior years.
During her time at the Northwestern University in Illinois, she was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, eventually serving as its president.

IBM employees have also criticized her for accepting pay bonuses during times of layoffs and outsourcing.
As a director at IBM, she has been involved in various IBM organizations like Women in Technology Council, Women's Executive Council, and Women's Leadership Council, since the year 2012.
She served as one of the board of directors of American International Group, Inc., the multinational finance and insurance corporation, from 2006 to 2009.
She serves on the board of overseers and board of managers for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and is also a council member at the Latin America Conservation Council.
In the year 2017, she served as a member of the White House's Business Advisory Panel, before the panel dissolved itself that August.
She is one among the board of trustees of her alma mater Northwestern University. She was the commencement speaker for the graduating class of the year 2015.
Following her graduation in 1979, she started her career with General Motors Institute in Detroit, being responsible for application and systems development.
She joined IBM in the year 1981 as a systems analyst and systems engineer in Detroit, and later moved on to various technical positions, where she was working with various clients in the insurance industry.
In the year 2002, she, as the general manager of IBM’s global services division, helped negotiate the purchase of the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion, which was the "largest in professional services history."
Her big break was with the task of integrating PricewaterhouseCoopers and its consultants with IBM, while she was the senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services.

Her other roles in the company include senior vice president of Enterprise Business Services-IBM Global Services, general manager of IBM's Global Insurance and Financial Services Sector, managing partner at IBM Business Consulting Services, Inc as well as the general manager of Insurance Industry Group.
In the year 2006, Rometty was honored with Carl Sloane Award from the Association of Management Consulting Firms.
She, as the senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy, got the company's focus on "fast-growing analytics unit," in the year 2009.
During her tenure as the senior vice president of global sales and distribution, she pushed the development of IBM's growth-markets unit to focus on emerging markets such as Brazil and Vietnam, as in charge of IBM's sales force.
She became the first female chief executive and president of IBM on January 1, 2012, and following the retirement of former CEO Sam Palmisano, she took over the role of IBM Chairperson on October 1, 2012.
Between the years 2012 to 2015, Rometty had led IBM into various acquisitions of a total of 30 companies, spending $8.5 billion.
In the year 2014, she spearheaded the partnership with Apple design applications for IBM's enterprise customers. The same year, she brokered the company to partner with SAP on cloud computing and with Twitter on data analytics. The next year, she also led a partnership between IBM and Box.
Her tenure as CEO was reported to have shifted IBM away from "shrinking businesses such as computers and operating system software, and into higher-growth areas like artificial intelligence," by Austin Business in the May 2017 publication.
It was in January 2018, that the company reported first quarter of year-over-year revenue increase since 2012, with growth particularly in areas like data, blockchain, and the cloud.
In the year 1979, Rometty married Mark Anthony Rometty, a private-equity investor. The couple currently divides their time between New York and Bonita Springs, Florida.