There's no question that IBM is undergoing a huge and painful transformation.

Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty is doing a lot of things right to navigate IBM through it.

But Tuesday was a pivotal day for the company and she was no where to be seen, missing a chance to show leadership.

On Tuesday, IBM announced its fourth quarter earnings and offered guidance for 2015.

That might sound like an ordinary quarterly earnings, business as usual. And had this been a run-of-the-mill report, her presence, or lack thereof, would have been a yawn.

But this wasn't a typical earnings report for the company. In October, at the last quarterly earnings, Ginni Rometty had some particularly harsh news to share: She had to tell investors that IBM was abandoning its years-long promise, made by her predecessor, to hit $20 earnings per share by 2015, a plan internally called Roadmap 2015.

The news in October sent the stock into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. However, that decision, as we argued at the time, was the best decision she could make for the long-term health of IBM.

Until she abandoned Roadmap 2015, IBM had been twisting itself into pretzels to grow profits, even though a massive shift had since occurred in the enterprise tech industry that caused the floor to drop out from under IBM's revenues.

The business world is shifting to cloud computing, where they rent much of their technology. IBM has got some real game in the cloud computing business, but its traditional businesses that sells hardware, software, consulting began losing money faster than it could roll out and sell new cloud services.

IBM did all sorts of financial engineering to keep profits growing while revenue began to tank: layoffs, shedding business units, spending billions on share buy-backs to reduce the number of shares in circulation (even issuing debt to pay for the buy backs).

Typically IBM leaves CFO Martin Schroeter to meet with analysts on his own to talk about the quarterly financials.

But when the time came to ditch Roadmap 2015 in October, Rometty broke tradition, joined the call and did the TV interviews. It was good that she showed up.

When asked at that time about the the new plan for 2015 and beyond, she promised IBM would reveal that stuff at the next quarterly earnings report.

IBM reported earnings on Tuesday, but Rometty was not on the phone. She did not do the TV interviews. CFO Schroeter was back, on his own, explaining how the company's transformation was going.

While he had pockets of good news to report, he also had some bad news: IBM expected revenue to be basically flat in 2015 and the new EPS bar fell below what the Street expected to hear: IBM expects EPS of $15.75-$16.50, while analysts were projecting $16.53.

Schroeter tried to sound optimistic but realistic about the company. He also appeared on CNBC later and talked to the Wall Street Journal to answer questions about IBM's turnaround.

But we can't help wonder, where was the company's CEO for this important day? An IBM spokesperson told us that she wasn't on the call because, "It's typical at IBM for the CFO to host the conference call with the investor community."

Bill Kreher, technology analyst for Edward Jones, who did attend the call, told us, "It was unusual for her to be on the call last quarter and it underscored the urgency that she felt at the time. So, if it was important for her to be on the call last quarter, why wasn't it important for her to be on it this quarter?"

Kreher was left with the feeling that "2015 will be a year of lumpy results. But IBM can demonstrate steady earnings and growth. That’s an opportunity," he told us.

Rometty isn't a stranger to public appearances. She's a headliner at many a conference, although she is not slated to be at the big one happening in Davos, Switzerland this week, the World Economic Forum, reports the New York Times.  

And she is expected to be at IBM's Investor Day meeting in February.

Still, this was a leadership miss for Rometty when she can ill afford it. She has a mere 48% approval rating from her employees, according to job hunting site, Glassdoor.com.

In comparison, other CEOs who are also leading their companies through a transition are using every opportunity to be visible and articulate the vision and the turnaround plan.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a point to start personally attending all quarterly analyst calls when he took the job in February. This broke with the tradition held by previous CEO Steve Ballmer not to attend. Nadella has an 82% approval rating on Glassdoor.

HP CEO Meg Whitman, always mans the conference calls, never missing a chance to talk about HP's turnaround. Even with all the turmoil at that company, she has a 78% approval rating on Glassdoor.

Likewise, Cisco's CEO John Chambers attends quarterly conference calls, as does both of Oracle's CEOs, Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, as well as its former founder CEO (now CTO and executive chairman) Larry Ellison. In fact, even after Ellison resigned as CEO a few months ago, the analysts joked that they would miss him on the calls. He quipped back "You should be so lucky. I am staying on the call."

Being a great leader doesn't just mean biting the bullet when things go wrong. That's important. It's also important to share your vision as clearly and as frequently as you can.

IBM needs Rometty to keep showing her personal leadership throughout this transition.

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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is getting a nice raise for 2015 and earned most of her bonus for 2014 even though the company's stock is performing terribly.

Rometty got a $100,000 increase in salary, from $1.5 million in 2014 to $1.6 million in 2015. She's also being granted $13.3 million in restricted stock units in 2015, up from $12.75 million last year, but she won't actually receive those shares until three years after they were granted (Feb. 2017 and 2018 respectively).

She earned most of her 2014 bonus, bringing in $3.6 million out of a possible $4 million. And she's eligible for a bigger $5 million bonus in 2015.

Meaning, if she earns her full bonus in 2015, she'll be awarded $19.9 million in total compensation in 2015, compared to $17.9 million awarded in 2014. That's an 11% raise.

Now, $20 million isn't an excessive salary for the CEO and chairman of one of the biggest, most venerable tech companies in the world, and a highly profitable one at that. Plenty of other CEOs earn millions more.

Still, at the end of 2013, when the company's revenues and profits declined, Rometty and her senior staff opted not to take their cash bonuses at all.

IBM is still going through a rough transition with declining revenues. Earlier this year, Rometty made the tough-but-necessary choice to abandon the company's Roadmap 2015. That was a promise made by her predecessor to hit $20 EPS by 2015. IBM was twisting itself into financial engineering pretzels to try and meet that promise.

The stock tumbled on that news in October and hasn't recovered, leading it to be one of the worst performing stocks on the Dow two years running.

That said, Rometty is making a lot of decisions that appear to be good for the company's turn-around, like shedding low-margin or unprofitable businesses, investing billions in hot new areas like cloud computing, and signing on huge new partners like Apple, Twitter, Tencent.

A change in leadership right now would not be good, Bill Kreher, technology analyst for Edward Jones tells us. So we can understand why IBM's board would entice her to stay. Still, the company's annual layoff cycle and troubled financials have led to some poor moral among the Big Blue workforce, sources tell us. Rometty has got a low 48% percent approval rating from employees who rated her on job-hunting site Glassdoor. So, her raise might not go over too well with everyone.

Here's the chart IBM just shared on executive pay:

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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty looks more like glamor girl than a geek. She's definitely one of the best-dressed CEOs in the tech world, with killer clothes, polished make-up, hair typically neatly contained in a school-girl headband that she somehow makes look sophisticated.

She looks like she came from the sales and marketing world. And she did, sort of.

She made her mark as a senior VP in IBM's consulting unit, Global Business Services, responsible for integrating PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting after IBM bought it in 2002. It was one of Lou Gerstner's final turnaround moves, when he converted IBM from a floundering hardware company, to a hardware, software and consulting giant.

Prior to the CEO job, she led IBM sales and marketing, which also makes her seem like a salesperson.

But she actually started her career at IBM as a systems engineer. She earned her bachelors degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Northwestern University.

And when she talks about some of the new technology IBM is working on, particularly IBM's thinking/learning/talking computer Watson, her inner geek comes out, reports the Financial Times' Gillian Tett, from a rare one-on-one interview with Rometty. Tett reports:

Suddenly we are talking not as chief executive and journalist but as two curious, intense geeks. “Watson augments human decision-making because it isn’t governed by human boundaries. It draws together all this information and forms hypotheses, millions of them, and then tests them with all the data it can find. It learns over time what data is reliable, and that’s part of its learning process," Rometty told Tett.

Rometty revealed a number of other surprising things about her background, in that interview, too.

1. She grew up in “a very middle class, average background” in Chicago until she was 15 when her parents got divorced.
2. She is the oldest of four kids.
3. Until the divorce, Her mom was a stay-at-home mom, but was then forced to work multiple jobs to support her family.
4. Her mom also went to college at night. Rometty spent a lot of time watching her siblings.
5. Rometty's mom was clearly her role model. "She sacrificed everything. She went to school in the day and worked nights, too, and got her degree. She never complained," Rometty told Tett. "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."
6. Rometty attended Northwestern via a scholarship from General Motors.
7. She worked at GM for two years, long enough to meet her husband, Mark Anthony Rometty, and then got a job at IBM in 1981 in Detroit, Michigan. She's been at IBM ever since.
8. She credits her husband Mark for supporting her career as she rose the top, even with the housework. "He has always done his fair share of everything — I don’t think I’ve ever done his laundry or ironed his shirts," she told Tett. (Facebook COO and feminist Sheryl Sandberg would probably point out that if Rometty was a man, she wouldn't have been asked if the wife supported a successful career, helped with the housework or wanted him to iron her clothes. Just sayin'.)
9. Mark avoids the spotlight. No one knows much about him besides his early job at GM and that he's an an investor in an oil company. Rometty has said that he gets really annoyed that the world tends to mispronounce his name. It's "rah-MET-ty", emphasis on the second syllable, not the first.
10. She loves Starbucks but doesn't drink coffee. She's into tea.

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At IBM's Investor's Day meeting on Thursday, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty laid out a new strategic goal for the company, after failing to meet the last one set by her predecessor, Sam Palmisano.

She is shifting $4 billion to spend on four fast-growing markets: cloud, big data/analytics, enterprise mobile/social, computer security. She has promised to grow these businesses from $25 billion in revenue last year (27% of of the company's revenue) to $40 billion in combined annual revenue by 2018, or a promised 40% of the company’s expected total revenue by then. 

And the $4 billion doesn't include acquisitions.

"We will acquire what we need. We continue to be acquisitive," Rometty says. "What we buy is going to complement the areas we've chosen to be in."

Schroeter also added that IBM has no size limit on the kind of acquisition it will make.

Years ago, Palmisano had promised to grow IBM's profits to $20 earnings per share by 2015.

Then the market sands shifted out from IBM's feet and IBM's revenue started shrinking and fast. IBM went into cost-cutting mode, selling off low-performing business, laying off thousands of workers, spending billions upon billions on stock buybacks to reduce the numbers of shares in circulation and hit that $20/share target. It didn't work and earlier this year she told investors that IBM wouldn't make that target. She revised the 2015 EPS target to $15.75 to $16.50.

"We are engineering a downtown," explained CFO Martin Schroeter. IBM also on Thursday said it expects to take a bigger hit on the foreign exchange rate, trimming profits by more than 6 points, above previous projections of 5-6 points.

Rometty didn't neglect investment altogether during that cost-cutting time. She spent a little over $3 billion on cloud initiatives including turning Watson into a cloud business, building out cloud data centers worldwide and launching a software-app hosting cloud called Bluemix. She also dedicated $3 billion to R&D to create a next-gen semiconductor. More recently, she dedicated another $1 billion to get into the a hot young market called software-defined storage, which threatens storage market leader EMC.

Still, all of the businesses that IBM owned became shrinking dinosaurs as enterprises started using cloud computing more, renting their apps hosted elsewhere on a subscription "pay-for-use" basis, instead of buying everything and installing it in their own data centers.

Faster, cheaper computing power and storage also led to new kinds of tech like "big data." Every company can now afford to do this kind of business analysis, not just the biggest ones with the biggest IT budgets.

IBM wasn't late to cloud. It's been competing with Amazon years before Google jumped in. And it certainly wasn't late to analytics. IBM was one of the leaders in selling that tech the old fashioned way: as expensive software and computer systems.

Still, it's bread-and-butter businesses were shrinking faster than it could grow the new markets. Revenue declined 6% to $92.8 billion in 2014 and IBM has said it doesn't expect total revenue to grow in 2015. As companies rent more tech, they don't buy as many expensive computer servers, storage, software and they don't need consulting services to install it all.

Interestingly, Schroeter explained that much of the $4 billion will come from cost savings from IBM using these new technologies internally.

"The things we do for clients with analytics, we do ourselves. We're using Watson on first-level support. We don’t just see 3% savings, we see 80% savings. Now, you only see it on small part of the business, but it freed up spending. Instead of returning it to profits, we choose reinvest a big part of it."

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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty faced investors on Thursday to unveil a new roadmap for the company since she was forced to abandon the old one, which was not achieved, back in October.

One analyst asked: did she learn anything from that failure?

Answer: yes.

"I'm a big believer in lessons learned. Constantly with the team we go over why, why, why? What did you learn and what would you do different, right? The only bad mistake is a mistake you don't learn from," she said.

For herself, she had two takeaways from the failure of IBM to hit its years-long promise of $20 earnings per share by 2015:

No. 1. The enterprise tech world is changing faster than she thought it would.

These days, companies are spending their money on a whole bunch of new technologies like cloud computing, mobile, social, and big data. That means they are spending less on old-fashioned computers, expensive software, and consulting services to install and manage that stuff — which is where IBM makes most of its money.

"There's quite a lesson learned about predicting that change is going to happen, and it happened at an unprecedented rate, and to allow for things that you don't yet see to happen. That's my biggest learning," she said. "We didn't project at that time that there would be that industry change."

So now, as IBM makes business plans, everyone is forced to defend. "As we make assumptions about our strategy, we are constantly challenging them, right? Why will that remain true?" she says, adding.

No. 2. She wasn't watching how consumer technology was invading the workplace. 

Rometty didn't predict how consumer tech was being brought to work, giving employees increasing control over what apps they use and how they want to work.

"I also learned to watch [the] consumer [trends]. And by the way, I do remember the time when some of you were saying, come on shouldn't you be looking more at consumer? It wasn't about going into consumer. My goodness. We spent a lot of time getting out of consumer. We sold the Thinkpad. We sold the PC business to Lenovo. But, we then had to learn to say, it wasn't about the device, it was about how it would actually transform work. That was a learning," she says.

(Red Hat CEO recently talked to Business Insider about this. He said the IT departments these days are in a fight for their lives.)

To recap the reason why someone would even ask her this question:

In October, Rometty told investors it would not achieve its years-long promise, made by her predecessor, to hit $20 earnings per share by 2015, a plan internally called Roadmap 2015.

When Rometty bailed on Roadmap 2015, she sent the stock into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. We argued at the time that giving up this goal was ultimately good for the company. IBM needed to stop killing itself with layoffs and financial maneuvering to hit an arbitrary profit number at an arbitrary time. It needed to be focused on the land grab going on in the hot new enterprise markets that were quickly overtaking the stalwarts like IBM.

Rometty told investors on Thursday that this is exactly her new plan.

IBM will spend $4 billion to grow $40 billion in revenue in what it calls strategic areas like cloud computing, mobile, and big data by 2018. That will nearly double what IBM is making on these areas now. And that's on top of the $7 billion she's already committed to spend on cloud, computer storage, and microprocessor R&D. And that doesn't include any acquisitions, big or small.

"This is not the fist time IBM reinvents itself and won’t be the last," Rometty said.

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IBM is going through some rough times these days, but its board seems happy with the fix-it plans laid out by chairman and CEO Ginny Rometty, if her rising compensation is any indication.

Rometty's total compensation for 2014 was $19.3 million, mostly from about $12.5 million in restricted stock grants, according to documents filed Monday with the SEC. While IBM says she took home $0 in a "bonus," it also says she took home $3.6 million from her "non-equity incentive plan compensation" which is basically a bonus.

This pay package is up from nearly $14 million she made in 2013. That was the year that IBM stumbled and she and her senior staff voluntarily turned down the money known as the "non-equity incentive plan compensation." Most of her pay came from $11.7 million in stock grants.

As we previously reported, IBM has already given her a raise for 2015. Her base salary has been boosted by $100,000 to $1.6 million, and she'll get $13.3 million in restricted stock units. And she's eligible for a bigger $5 million bonus in 2015.

$19.3 million is not an over-the-top salary for the person in charge of one of the biggest, most venerable tech companies in the world, and a highly profitable one at that. Plenty of other CEOs earn millions more.

But things are not smooth for her. She's leading IBM through one of its epic transitions. All of its its core businesses are declining in revenues and IBM has been selling off business units and laying off workers in response.

Earlier this year, Rometty made the tough-but-necessary choice to abandon the company's Roadmap 2015. That was a promise made by her predecessor to hit $20 EPS by 2015. The stock tumbled on that news in October and hasn't recovered.

Last month, she revealed a new roadmap: She's investing $4 billion to grow a whole new crop of businesses.

These businesses, which include cloud computing, big data/analytics, enterprise mobile/social and computer security brought in about $25 billion in revenue last year (27% of of the company's revenue). She wants them to become $40 billion in combined annual revenue by 2018, or 40% of the company’s expected revenue.

She's actually got a solid, common-sense plan to get there but she still has to get there. Investors likely won't jump on board until she starts delivering that top-line growth.

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Meg Whitman is one of the most generously compensated CEOs compared to most of her peers, according to a new report from UBS analyst Steven Milunovich.

She's especially paid better than one of her direct competitors, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

"In considering CEO compensation relative to market cap, the heads of Nimble, 3D Systems, and HP are better paid while IBM's Rometty is underpaid albeit following a couple difficult years," Milunovich wrote.

One of the things making Whitman's compensation package so sweet: a huge golden parachute.

Whitman would get nearly $91 million if HP gets acquired – more than double her peers  – and $51 million if she's forced out (not fired for cause) – again, nearly double.

That compares to zip that Tim Cook gets in either situation and $0 for Rometty for an acquisition, or $14.6 million if she's terminated.

Here's the charts:

Calculating bonuses

It's also interesting what these CEOs and their executive teams need to do to get a bonus.

Whitman and team's cash bonus is weighted more towards cash flow than to improving revenue. The stock bonus is based on profit and stock performance (50/50), Milunovich reports. So she does well if she controls costs, even if she doesn't grow the top line.

IBM's Rometty and her team's cash bonus is "more dependent on profit and cash flow than on revenue," Milunovich writes. "We would like to see a bit more weight on revenue ... We've argued that IBM could use more of a growth mentality and should shrink in order to grow."

Where revenue is factored in, it's weighted toward growing revenue in IBM's "strategic" initiatives, the new areas that IBM is investing in that replace its older, shrinking business units. And for stock bonuses for IBM, its 70% profit and 30% cash flow. Again, IBM executives do well if they control costs.

In comparison, Apple, which recently posted the best quarter of any company ever, requires Cook and crew to perform equally well on revenue growth and profit for a cash bonus (weighted 50/50). Stock bonuses are based entirely on stock performance.

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IBM chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty is a sucessful role model to many people —especially when they learn that her childhood was somewhat difficult. 

Rometty openly talks about growing up and says her mother is her "hero." Her parents divorced when she was 15. She doesn't talk about her father much.

In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Rometty was asked about her parents. She zeroed in on her mother, a homemaker who initially didn't have a college education. But she figured out how to provide for her family anyhow.

"She did raise my brothers and sisters and myself," Rometty told Rose. "And she found herself one day with nothing. She didn’t have a college degree. She didn’t have a job. She had been raising us. Her job was in the home. She hadn’t worked outside. And we never saw my mom blink, we never saw her cry. She did everything she had to do."

Rometty (who's maiden name is Virginia Nicosia) is the oldest of four and grew up in “a very middle class, average background” in Chicago, she explained in an earlier interview this year.

After her parents split up, her mom worked multiple jobs to support her family and went to night school to get a college degree. Rometty babysat her younger siblings at night.

"She got an education. She got a great job. She was determined that we would succeed," Rometty says of her mom. "What I always learned from my mom was never let anything or someone define who are you."

We may hear more about her personal journey when she addresses the 2015 class from her alma mater, Northwestern, in June. Rometty told Rose her speech would focus on these key lessons learned from her mom.

Her mom's work ethic clearly filtered to Rometty. She attended Northwestern on a scholarship from GM, getting a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After a short two-year stint working for GM (long enough to meet her husband), she landed at IBM in an entry-level, systems engineer role and spent the next 31 years working her way to the top.

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Last week, Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM, stood on stage in front of a packed room and announced that she was going to make "a bold prediction."

"In the future, every decision that mankind makes is going to be informed by a cognitive system like Watson," she said, "and our lives will be better for it."

Listening in were the crowds of engineers, designers, doctors, bankers, researchers, and reporters that IBM had ferried over to a massive glass-and-steel structure on the banks of the East River in Brooklyn.

The occasion was a new event, World of Watson, designed to showcase the "ecosystem" of innovation happening around Watson, IBM's signature artificial-intelligence system.

Watson became famous in 2011 for beating Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings at his own game. But now IBM has much larger plans for it, which Rometty was hinting at with her "bold prediction."

"Jeopardy! was all about answers," IBM Watson Group vice president Stephen Gold explained earlier in the day, describing how chefs were using Watson to develop new recipes. "This is all about discovery."

Chef Watson, however, is just a fun example of the kind of creative thinking Watson can be trained to do. Rometty made clear that the company's true aspirations are much larger and more consequential than what's for dinner.

The World of Watson event drove this home. It suggested that cognitive systems have a place in almost any type of decision a person or company may be faced with, whether that involves buying a house, making an investment, developing a pharmaceutical drug, or designing a new toy.

"As Watson gets smarter, his ability to reason is going to exponentially increase," Rometty said. What will be really game changing won't be Watson's knack for recalling facts faster than even the most trivia-savvy human, but its ability to assist people with the complex and nuanced tasks of decision-making and analysis.

"Watson deals in the gray area, where there's not a perfect right and wrong answer," she continued. "That's the hardest thing we do as humans."

If Rometty's big prediction pans out, this — the gray area that was once our exclusive and often most-challenging domain — may eventually become much easier.

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The percentage of of women holding technical jobs in corporate America is abysmally small — about 15% — and has been for years.

That means you need a microscope to find women in high-powered tech positions amidst a sea of men.

But among those women who do enter the field, and then stay the course, many are killing it in their professions. They're inventing or working with amazing tech or are leaders at their companies.

So every year we get out our microscope and find a whole bunch of women engineers with fabulous, powerful jobs. 

No. 23: Ubisoft's Lisette Titre

Lisette Titre, Art Manager at Ubisoft

Titre has been a video game developer for over thirteen years. A couple of months ago she landed at Ubisoft, makers of the smash hit Assassin's Creed series, as a manager in its art/computer animation department.

Not only does she have a geek's dream job, but Titre has also been a tireless advocate encouraging more young women, especially underprivileged youth, to consider the gaming industry as a career.

No. 22: SpaceX's Amanda Stiles

Amanda Stiles, Mission Operations Engineer at Space Exploration Technologies

Stiles is a training and simulation engineer for SpaceX's various commercial operations.

She came to SpaceX after running technical operations for the X PRIZE Foundation and was particularly involved in the Google Lunar X PRIZE, where Google is offering $30 million in prizes to people who build robots to send to the moon.

She also did a stint at the NASA Ames Research Center, testing software for a lunar spacecraft.

No. 21: Intersect ENT's Lisa Earnhardt

Lisa Earnhardt, president, CEO at Intersect ENT

Intersect ENT makes a biotech device for millions of people suffering from from chronic ear and sinus infections. The tiny device is implanted into the body and delivers small, constant doses of medication, a less invasive alternative than surgery.

Earnhardt joined the company in 2008 and led it through an IPO last summer.

Prior to that she was president of Boston Scientific’s Cardiac Surgery division with over 450 employees.

On Friday morning, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty gave the commencement speech at her alma mater, Northwestern University.

She holds a bachelor of science degree in computer science and electrical engineering, graduating with high honors.

After graduating, Rometty immediately went into the workforce and is now CEO of one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, and the first woman to lead the venerable old company.

But she never went back for a post grad degree. Instead, the university granted her an honorary PhD and she joked she was grateful to have it because it allowed her to play catch up with her siblings. (Rometty also has an honorary PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.)

Rometty is the oldest of four. She often tells the story of how her dad left the family when she was a kid, leaving her mom to figure out how to raise four kids on her own, which she was able to do by going to school to get a nursing degree and working at night.

That appreciation for education was imprinted on the whole Nicosia clan (her maiden name), Rometty said during the speech:

And my brother and two sisters, they share, among themselves, five degrees from Dartmouth, Georgia Tech and Northwestern. And thank goodness for this doctorate, because I was losing that race on number of degrees.

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As CEO of IBM, one of the oldest, most powerful companies in the world, Ginni Rometty is no stranger to public speaking.

On Friday, she gave a commencement speech at her alma mater, Northwestern.

During these kind of speeches, Rometty has openly talked about her modest middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago, what it's like being raised by her single mom after her dad left, and her three siblings.

But she hardly ever mentions her husband of 35 years, Mark Rometty, in her speeches, who prefers to stay out of the spotlight.

Apparently, he noticed.  So Rometty included him in one of the funniest portions of her speech, telling this great anecdote about how he set her on her career path:

I had worked for a senior executive, and he decided to go to a new job. He came in to me one day and he said, wonderful, you are the candidate to replace me. So, I was called in the office and with great excitement told I'd be offered this job.

Well, I can remember my reaction: it wasn't the same great excitement. I looked at him and I said, tsk, it's too early. I'm not ready. Just give me a few more years and I'd be ready for this. I need to go home and I need to go sleep on that. Well, that evening, my husband, now up there [she pointed upward, which made it look like she was pointing at heaven] ...well, he's up in the stands, I don't mean too far up.

[The crowd laughed.]

My husband of 35 years. Oh, boy. He says I never mention him, and then I do and I mess it up, you know.

[More laughter. ]

He sat and listened patiently to my story, like he always does. And then he looked at me and he said one thing. He said, do you think a man would have answered the question that way? He said, I know you. In six months you'll be ready for something else. And you know what? He was right. And I went in the next day and I took that job.

And that takes me to my second lesson to leave you with: growth and comfort never co‑exist. I want you to close your eyes ... and ask yourself, when have you learned the most? I guarantee it's when you felt at risk.

So, when you feel anxious, maybe tomorrow, when you leave and start a new job, I guarantee that that is a good sign.

And this is proven to be a really important realization to me throughout my whole career. I've always looked for challenges and I have found plenty.

Here's a rare photo of Ginni and Mark Rometty.

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When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote to the chief executives of all the S&P 500 companies in April asking them to lay off on stock buybacks and dividend payouts, he ignited a debate about shareholder value.

Now, it's easy to point to activist investors as the villains who force boards to return cash to shareholders at the risk of damaging companies' long-term development.

But activists are not the only ones pushing for heightened returns.

Bloomberg's Alex Barinka reports that the CEOs of America's large cap companies have a lot to gain from it too.

Of the 15 (non-Wall Street) companies that returned the most money to shareholders via buybacks last year, 11 based their chief executives' compensation on earnings per share, total shareholder return, or both, according to the report.

So when a company like IBM spends money, say, buying back stock from investors, or paying out dividends, that tends to boost its share price. And when the share price goes up, so does the CEO's pay.

In fact, IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty depends quite a bit on operating earnings per share – almost 40 percent of her pay package is based on it, according to Bloomberg.

At Disney, CEO Bob Iger's performance-based stock award hinges both on total shareholder returns and earnings per share, compared with the S&P 500 index.

It's a win-win. Unless, like Fink, you believe that there's more to a board's mandate than short-term payouts.

"Corporate leaders’ duty of care and loyalty is not to every investor or trader who owns their companies’ shares at any moment in time, but to the company and its long-term owners," Fink wrote in his April letter.

Read the full story on Bloomberg »

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CEO Ginni Rometty just explained her thinking on that deal last year where she divested IBM's unprofitable chip business, not by selling it, but by paying $1.5 billion to its partner GlobalFoundaries to take the business off her hands.

When asked to name the biggest business lesson she learned over the past year, Rometty told Fortune magazine:

I’d say the biggest lesson – or reminder – was the importance of moving to the future, making decisions for the long term and betting big. That’s something everyone says, but it’s easier said than done.

When it comes to managing for the long term, we sold our semiconductor manufacturing operations last year. We did it in order to move to higher value. We actually shrank the company while many voices were calling out for top-line growth. And it’s doubly hard with something that has been part of your company for more than half a century.

While chip research and development are critical, chip manufacturing was no longer core to IBM’s future. We’ve done this before — with PCs and commodity servers — and no doubt we’ll do it again. It’s what you do when your goal isn’t just short-term results, but successfully leading your industry in the future.

So what does she see as core to IBM's future? The super smart computer that can talk and reason like a human called Watson:

Watson learns. He is being trained by experts in healthcare and in an increasing number of industries and professions. The bet we have placed on Watson isn’t merely the size of the investment — now in the billions. The truly big bet was in opening up Watson to the world — putting him on the cloud, making Watson’s APIs open and available to the world’s developers, entrepreneurs and businesses — building an open ecosystem. 

Rometty's vision is that in the future, EVERY DECISION humans make will be done in conjunction with such a smart computer, like the movie "Her" or the Kim Stanley Robinson's bestselling sci-fi book "2312."

She's likely right.

In fact, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has a simiar vision. Where he's guiding Microsoft to usher in that world for consumers and employees, Rometty is trying it to big companies and industries, especially, health care.

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Although there have been rumors all year that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is undertaking a major re-org of the company, she's actually dolling out big changes in smaller bits and drabs.

For instance, on Tuesday, at the Gartner Symposium tech conference in Orlando, she announced the new IBM Cognitive Business Solutions consulting business unit, which will report to Stephen Pratt.

Pratt joined IBM last summer from Infosys (where he was, reportedly, at one point, the highest paid top-level executive for the Indian outsourcer, according to the Indian news site Economic Times.)

This new unit is, for the most part, a blending of two older IBM organizations, the successor to the "e-Business" and "Smarter Planet" units, the company tells us.

Predictions and personalization

However, at its heart is a new 2,000-person consulting organization that aims to help companies not just collect and store "big data" but to find insights from that data using sophisticated machine learning software (once upon a time called "artificial intelligence"), aka, IBM's super smart talking computer Watson Analytics.

For example, this army of consultants helped to create a new app for a big retailer that helped predict which products to stock based on information ranging from tweets to the weather; a health care organization come up with personalized treatment recommendations for cancer patients; a school to deliver personalized lesson plans for students. 

IBM says it also plans to train another 25,000 consultants, who report up to Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services, on how to create custom "cognitive computing" apps for businesses this fall.

Rometty is shifting more of the company to attack what she sees as big growth areas (like big data, machine learning, analytics, cloud computing) while she's ditching the shrinking business areas that are declining in revenues and dragging down profits, (like chip manufacturing and low-cost commodity servers).

Last month, Rometty also created a new business unit based on Watson called Watson Health. It's also a biggie, with 2,400 people reporting to new hire Deborah DiSanzo. They will be chasing Rometty's "moonshot" dream: that Watson will overhaul health care making it smarter, more personalized and more affordable for everyone, worldwide.

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ExecRank has just released its ranking of the 250 best CEOs of large cap companies and the top of the list is dominated by tech.

ExecRank is a board member job placement firm, meaning it helps companies find board members and advisors.

But it's also known for its lists like this. It looked at 24 attributes to come up with its list of the best CEOs including things like:

• Experience in the executive role
• Business results during tenure
• Position as Founder or Chairman of company
• Board member appointments
• Company earnings per share growth this year
• Industry/professional reputation.

We've skimmed the full list of 250 CEOs to find the the top 10 tech CEOs.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Tim Cook came out on top.

But some of the others in the list might be controversial such as the embattled Ginni Rometty, who's trying to transform a shrinking IBM: Chuck Robbins, who's only been in his role for a few months, and Mark Hurd, who shares the role with finance queen Safra Catz (who isn't even mentioned on this list).

In fact there are scant few women on the list at all, a reflection of how women currently hold a mere 22 CEO positions (4.4%) positions at S&P 500 companies, reports Catalyst.

All that said, here are the 14 best CEOs in tech, all of whom made the top 100 overall, according to ExecRank:

1. Tim Cook, Apple (Overall rank: No. 1)

2. Larry Page, Alphabet (formerly known as Google; Overall rank: No. 2) 

3. Satya Nadella, Microsoft (Overall rank: No. 3)

4. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (Overall rank No. 8)

5. Randall Stephenson, AT&T (Overall rank No. 14)

6. Lowell McAdam, Verizon (Overall rank No. 16)

7. Brian Krzanich, Intel (Overall rank No. 17)

8. Ginni Rometty, IBM (Overall rank No. 19)

9. Chuck Robbins, Cisco (Overall rank No. 24)

10. Mark Hurd, Oracle (Overall rank No. 31)

11. Steven Mollenkopf, Qualcomm (Overall rank No. 39)

12. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo (Overall rank No. 64)

13. Marc Benioff, Salesforce (Overall rank N0. 70)

14. Reed Hastings, Netflix (Overall rank No. 91)

15. Charlie Ergen, Dish (Overall rank No. 95)

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If Wells Fargo hadn't gone out mobile app five years ago, it would be out of business, said its CEO and Chairman John Stumpf. 

"Today half our customers are mobile and, not only are they only on mobile, that’s their predominant use. If we weren’t on mobile, we would be out of business. And that’s just in five years," Stumpf said.

On stage at the Fortune Global Forum, the CEO of a 164-year-old banking company shared the spotlight with Ginni Rometty, CEO of the 104-year-old tech company IBM.

Both agreed that most important thing for their companies is to constantly be reinventing yourself. Otherwise, Stumpf joked, we would still be seeing the Wells Fargo horse-drawn carriages on the highways. 

"The companies that are most enduring and have the best opportunity in the future are those that can reinvent in a way that’s managed chaos," Stumpf said. 

Rometty's IBM is showcase for a company that needs to change to stay relevant. She's not apologetic for more than $8 billion in divestitures during her tenure as CEO.

"Reinvention is not about protecting your past," Rometty said. "We did hardware for 60 years. Don't protect your past, and don't define yourself as a product."

Instead, CEOs at the crux of the market shift as everything goes digital must make big bets as "stewards for the long term," Rometty said.

It's not enough to be digital now because all companies will be digital. The question for today's CEOs is to answer what's next. IBM is focused on cloud, big data, and mobility, but cognitive is the future, Rometty said. Her big bet is clearly on its intelligence platform Watson and all of its applications. 

Neither Rometty nor Stumpf are looking at the competition within their categories as guidance. "You are defined by your clients, you are not defined by your competition," Rometty said.

For Wells Fargo, a lot of innovation and reinvention is by focusing entirely on the customer and their needs. A bank can no longer be only a physical location, and the company would have died five years ago, Stumpf said, if it hadn't gone mobile.

"The people who influence us the most are outside," Stumpf said, listing companies like Amazon and Google. "They take complexity and make it simple. That has a huge influence. If we can’t tell a customer exactly what is in their account after a 25 year relationship with them, but they can ask Google and find out something in 3 nanoseconds, how would we look?"

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In May, Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM, stood on stage in front of a packed room and announced that she was going to make "a bold prediction."

"In the future, every decision that mankind makes is going to be informed by a cognitive system like Watson," she said, "and our lives will be better for it."

Listening in were the crowds of engineers, designers, doctors, bankers, researchers, and reporters that IBM had ferried over to a massive glass-and-steel structure on the banks of the East River in Brooklyn.

The occasion was a new event, World of Watson, designed to showcase the "ecosystem" of innovation happening around Watson, IBM's signature artificial-intelligence system.

Watson became famous in 2011 for beating Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings at his own game. But now IBM has much larger plans for it, which Rometty was hinting at with her "bold prediction."

"Jeopardy! was all about answers," IBM Watson Group vice president Stephen Gold explained earlier in the day, describing how chefs were using Watson to develop new recipes. "This is all about discovery."

Chef Watson, however, is just a fun example of the kind of creative thinking Watson can be trained to do. Rometty made clear that the company's true aspirations are much larger and more consequential than what's for dinner.

The World of Watson event drove this home. It suggested that cognitive systems have a place in almost any type of decision a person or company may be faced with, whether that involves buying a house, making an investment, developing a pharmaceutical drug, or designing a new toy.

"As Watson gets smarter, his ability to reason is going to exponentially increase," Rometty said. What will be really game changing won't be Watson's knack for recalling facts faster than even the most trivia-savvy human, but its ability to assist people with the complex and nuanced tasks of decision-making and analysis.

"Watson deals in the gray area, where there's not a perfect right and wrong answer," she continued. "That's the hardest thing we do as humans."

If Rometty's big prediction pans out, this — the gray area that was once our exclusive and often most-challenging domain — may eventually become much easier.

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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has a pretty startling vision for the future.

She sees the day when every decision humans make —from what we eat to how businesses operate — are done in consultation with human-like computers. 

This won't just change your routines, she believes "It will change who you are," she told a crowd during a keynote speech at Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday night.

IBM is working on making such super intelligent, human-like machines (which IBM calls "cognitive computing").

"This is an era of systems you do not program. They understand, they reason and they learn," she explains.

The ultimate example she gave was IBM's Watson, the smart, talking computer that can learn, reason, analyze.

Watson is still best known for winning Jeopardy in 2011 but it has "come a long way since then," Rometty said to the crowd.

"At that time what Watson could do was question and answer (which he did beat everyone) and he had five technologies," she says. Today Watson does 32 different functions with expertise in 50 different areas.

IBM has since turned the Watson technology into a bunch of different cloud computing services, allowing developers to embed its smarts into their apps or their devices.

80,000 developers working with Watson

So far, IBM has 80,000 developers in 36 countries who have put Watson into their apps or products, she said during the speech. IBM has another 500 Watson partners who provide additional offerings or services for Watson.

IBM continues to roll out more flavors of Watson, too, like a new Internet of Things-specific Watson unit and a health care-specific one. (Rometty believes that IBM will help usher in a new area of personalized, affordable health care, and that this will be one of her biggest legacies). 

Meanwhile, there's an increasingly long list of companies using Watson to create everything from Under Armor's new uber-personalized fitness app to a popular Japanese robot called "Pepper" doing the job of customer service rep at retail, banks, hotels and other places.

Still, she says, IBM has even bigger plans to make Watson more human.

"We're expanding Watson's senses, giving him things like sight. The first way he's learning sight is by reading medical images," she explains. 

She didn't mention giving Watson a sense of smell or taste, but he does already cook. There's a version called Chef Watson.

Explaining her vision for IBM and the future of humanity

Rometty has been under intense pressure from Wall Street throughout 2015 as she revamps IBM to become the company she envisions.

She's been selling off business units and reducing IBM's workforce (by selling units and through layoffs). Revenue has been in decline.

In the meantime, under her reign, she's been aggressively investing in Cognitive Computing and related businesses. She's plowed about $26 billion into it, IBM says, including more than 30 acquisitions of analytics related technologies.

Rometty says that her shift is already paying off. IBM's growth businesses were generating over $25 billion by the end of 2014 and "through the third-quarter of this year, they've grown 30%," she said at CES.

These units include analytics, computer security tech, cloud computing services and selling cloud computing technology for companies to install in their own private data centers (a traditional IBM business).

In the meantime, she's out to explain her vision of smart computers in our lives and changing who we are.

"I believe we will all reinvent ourselves. And you see a reinvented IBM emerging," she says, adding that she believes that IBM's smart computer technologies will reach millions "if not billions of individuals." 

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IBM just reported its fourth quarter earnings for 2015.

It's a beat across the board, but IBM shares are down roughly 3.5% in after hours. 

Here are the most important numbers:

EPS (Operating, non-GAAP):$4.84 a share vs $4.81 a share expected

Revenue: $22.06 bln vs $22.04 bln expected

Quarterly revenue was down 9% year-over-year. IBM has reported declining year-over-year revenue for the last 15 quarters in a row.

The adjusted EPS was down 17% from the same period of last year. Part of the EPS growth had to do with a lowered tax rate, which went down 7.1 percentage points to 14.7%, compared to the year-ago period.

Shares were trading roughly flat following the earnings report. But it dropped more than 3.5% during the earnings call after it gave EPS guidance of "at least" $13.50 per share, down from the $15.00 per share street consensus.

For the full year 2015, IBM reported $81.7 billion in revenue, right in-line with expectations

Full year non-GAAP operating EPS was $14.92 per share, which was within the guidance range it provided last quarter, but slightly lower than the $14.93 per share the street was expecting.

That's already a big cut from the $20 EPS goal IBM had planned to reach by 2015. IBM CEO Ginny Rometty officially abandoned the plan called "Roadmap 2015" in the third quarter of 2014.

Instead, Rometty has acquired nearly 40 companies during her three years at IBM in order to nurture growth. IBM has been shifting its investment to what it calls "strategic imperatives," including growth areas like cloud computing, big data, and mobile apps. 

In fact, IBM said that its strategic imperatives business has grown 26% from last year, to $29 billion, which represents 35% of the company's total revenue.

"We continue to make significant progress in our transformation to higher value," Rometty said in a statement.

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