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

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.

When you remove layers, simplicity and speed happen.

I make time to exercise. It's not being indulgent. I think it's got a lot to do with your ability to manage properly and stay focused. There's no doubt about that.

I think, particularly in our tech industry, this is an industry that has violent innovation and then commoditization, and it's a cycle of innovation/commoditization.

I've got a distribution system that goes to 170 countries. If I acquire properly, you know, you may be successful in one or two countries, or one place; I can scale, and that's part of the value that IBM brings.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

I think, given who the IBM target company is, I feel our purpose is to be essential to our clients.

You define yourself by either what your clients want or what you believe they'll need for the future. So: Define yourself by your client, not your competitor.

It's easy to have an act one and two. Go ahead and have an act three, four, and five. The saying is the easy part. The doing is the hard part.

Don't protect your past. Don't protect your products.

I don't think anybody's just B2B or B2C anymore. You are B2I - business to individual.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.

I am very practical.

My mom had not worked a day in her life, and then she woke up when I was 15 and found herself with four children, no job, no money. But she set out and made it all OK for us, and from that, I saw that there's no problem that can't be solved.

You need to have a great support around you, people that empathise, understand and yet support, because these CEO jobs are all-consuming.

The amazing thing about IBM is that it's a company where I have had 10 different careers - local jobs, global jobs, technology jobs, industry jobs, financial services, insurance, start-ups, big scale. The network of talent around you is phenomenal.

If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs.

One day we're going to look back, and whatever this era will get called, it's going to put a premium on math and science.

When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.

I am big on - even with our whole team - it's always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn't work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?

This idea of 'New Collar' says for the jobs of the future here, there are many in technology that can be done without a four-year college degree and, therefore, 'New Collar' not 'Blue Collar,' 'White Collar.' It's 'New Collar.'

The ability to please your shareholders comes because of what you do for clients.

Above and beyond, not only are we an innovation company, we are in service of our clients.

Some people make their choice on size. I happen to not be a believer in that. I've often said, especially in an industry that's clamoring for growth, if I wanted size, I wouldn't have divested $8 billion of businesses.

When you're on a scale like we are in 170 countries and hundreds of thousands of people, you have a single point of view.

The social network will be the new production line.

With this emergence of big data and social mobility, you will, in fact, see the death of 'average,' Instead, you will see the era of you.

I believe that the idea of strategic beliefs may be more important than strategic planning when thinking about how you keep the long view.

Think about when a digital business marries up with what I'll call 'digital intelligence.' It is the dawn of a new era about being a 'cognitive' business. When every product, every service, how you run your company can actually have a piece that learns and thinks as part of it, you will be a cognitive business.

This century, the 21st century, will be the Indian century - and I really believe that.

India... what a big part you play in this story for IBM and for the world.

We share no data with the government anywhere in the world.

I never look at an acquisition really by size.

I think health care is absolutely ripe. It's an $8 trillion industry, lots of inefficiency in it.

You can engineer change.

Planes don't fly, trains don't run, banks don't operate without much of what IBM does.

Work on something that matters. Have courage.

You will have many more goals in the years ahead. But do not confuse a goal with a purpose.

I was always surrounded by people that wanted to mentor you.

I often sit back and say, 'Be sure about what I believe.'

I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

When I think of revenue growth, I think of the words 'mix' and 'shift.'

There will be times you make decisions that actually detract from growth.

Just because you started your careers in a certain role, let's say hardware engineering, does not mean you'll end your careers in hardware.