- I have a big vision, Sarah.
- Ooh, I'm excited. Spoiler alert!
- Before it's all said and done,
I would love for my team to win an Oscar®.
I wanna bring these stories to life
in a way that no B2B tech marketer
ever has done it before.
Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin
and welcome to Connections
where we hear from some of the most
innovative leaders in marketing.
I'm here in Austin, Texas, speaking with
Carla Piñeyro Sublett, the CMO of IBM.
How she got here might surprise you.
It included in her words, a midlife crisis
and dragging her family to the ends of the earth
in search of,
you guessed it,
connection.
- Welcome to Austin.
- It is gorgeous. I love it.
- And I have a little something for you
for our first 3D meeting.
- I love it. Oh, my God.
Gotta get ready.
Welcome to Austin right here.
- Yeah. You're looking good.
- Do I look good?
- Yeah. Totally suits you.
You look fabulous.
- Let's start at the beginning.
Where did you grow up?
- I have to admit
I have a little bit of an identity crisis.
So, I was born in Montreal
to Uruguayan parents,
raised in Dallas, and Austin is the place
I've lived the longest.
So I'm a little bit French Canadian,
a little bit South American, a lot Texan.
- But you've got it all.
- Where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?
- I was born from a family of entrepreneurs.
My parents moved to the States
to start a clothing line
and I was always surrounded by entrepreneurs.
And when I was 14, 15 years old,
my parents lost
my college fund in the stock market crash.
- Oh, my gosh.
- And it became very apparent to me
that I needed to help out.
And I was lifeguarding at the time
and the pool where I was lifeguarding
didn't have swim lessons.
So I finally decided to start a
swim lesson business and it exploded
and I called it "Supah-Fish" and --
"Supah-Fish"?
- "Supah-Fish" and that actually paid
for the first year of my college.
- What have you not done? This is incredible.
I have to tell you, I love your website.
It's so inspiring.
Finding Ubuntu
- Yeah, that's my midlife crisis.
And I actually did not anticipate --
- Come on, you're 20. There's no time for midlife --
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I left my prior job,
I was feeling very disconnected from my kids
and my husband and the people that I loved.
And I had just been
at a global seminar with the Aspen Institute.
And we had been learning about
Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu's philosophy
around ubuntu,
which basically means "you are me."
"I am you."
"We are connected."
Humanity.
And it was all about connection.
And I was starved for connection.
And I came home from that seminar
with world leaders
and said to my kids and my husband,
"We've got to do something differently.
We've got to change."
- Oh, oh, oh, oh.
- Landmine.
- See and safety ---
You're safety inspector in the park too, right?
- We've gotta do something differently
and I said,
"I wanna unenroll the kids from school
and reconnect to you, my husband, and the kids,
and travel the world."
And to my husband's credit, he did it.
And we did it and we traveled the world.
And the way we let people know
that we were alive and okay,
was uploading to this blog once a week.
And so that's Finding Ubuntu.
I saw massive personality changes in all of us.
The other big takeaway was
just being able to see my kids
and my husband connect with people
from completely different backgrounds.
It was just really special to see that,
it completely changed my values.
I think the other thing I realized, Sarah,
is you don't have to make a big, bold move
and unenroll your kids
and travel all over the world to connect with people.
You can throw your phone in a drawer for an afternoon
and camp in the backyard.
Whenever we're feeling disconnected,
That's kind of my first move.
- I love that.
Just like, okay, phones, iPads.
- I do it with my team too.
So, when I noticed
that the eyes are starting to glaze over
and folks are starting to get burned out.
We've moved to meeting-free Wednesdays
and I strongly encourage them to dump devices
so that they have time to think
and do work without the distraction.
And I've been guilty of it too.
You know, I text you instead of actually
picking up the phone and calling you
and hearing your voice. So,
this is the first time we're meeting in person,
which is really special to me.
It requires being intentional.
- I think it also requires some vulnerability.
Do you think you need to be vulnerable when
you're exploring connection?
- Actually, that's such a good question
because that's actually the biggest key
to establishing connection
is vulnerability.
It's actually a lot more fun
to move through world that way
and have no pretense.
- So it's been an adventure.
What brought you to IBM?
- So, during my time off,
I also was doing soul-searching
about my values and what was important to me.
And part of how I figured that out is I went
on a hundred professional dates --
- That's a lot.
- It's a lot. I called it "fworking."
I fake worked
and I basically would take every call,
go on every meeting, every interview.
And it was through that process
that I actually met Arvind, our CEO,
and he actually
offered for me to come to IBM that year.
But for whatever reason, I took another job
but it always kind of sat in the back of my mind,
like, did I make a mistake?
And I loved the other job.
And I feel like I did exactly what
I was intended to do there.
And when that work was done,
miraculously, my phone rang
and it was Arvind
and my predecessor, Michelle,
asking me if I'd come as the CMO.
And so here I am getting to shepherd
one of the most
iconic brands in the world back to growth.
- What's your vision for this iconic brand, IBM?
- What we've done over the last 110 years is remarkable.
Our research team has won five Nobel prizes,
we've invented everything
from the first personal computer
to now, we have an actual quantum computer
but I feel like the world doesn't quite get it.
And I was talking to a friend of mine
and she said
I mistakenly referred to us as a tech company.
And she said,
"Oh, Carla, you don't work for a tech company.
You work for the founder of the industry."
And that just gave me chills all over my body.
And so for me, my vision is to
really bring that to life in a very rich way.
I have a big vision, Sarah.
Ooh, I'm excited. Spoiler alert!
- Before it's all said and done,
I would love for my team to win an Oscar®.
I wanna bring these stories to life
in a way that no B2B tech marketer
ever has done it before.
And I wanna inspire the next generation
of really creative innovators
and engineers and developers
around the globe.
- I just got chills when you said that.
That's such beginner's mind and such
innovative thinking,
"We're gonna win an Oscar!"
But that's what you do as a visionary CMO.
And you have a history at IBM of
doing incredible branding.
And what's your thoughts on
reinventing the brand?
- One of the things I did not fully appreciate
until I got to the company was
the luminaries in design that we've worked with.
I mean, Paul Rand,
and then our architecture,
EIMS, Mies van der Rohe, I.M. Pei, Saarinen,
the company's heritage in design
is really spectacular.
So this isn't a "rip and replace."
There's a lot of goodness here to mine,
but for me it's about really modernizing this company
and distilling down for the world
what it is that we do,
who we are, who we do it for,
and bringing that to life
in a way that's so compelling
that people wanna binge-watch it.
- How are you going to do that?
Are you going to get movie crews?
What are you going to do?
- I mean, that's what I'm contemplating
but also in a way that has technical substance.
So I envision that
if somebody wants to learn about artificial intelligence,
they could watch a whole series about it,
with episodes and go deep in the technology
and really learn it.
Our kids are showing us
that people learn differently too.
I'm sure you've seen this
but my kids watch YouTube
to figure out how to do something.
So what if we just employed those same channels to
actually teach people about technology.
- At Salesforce, we pride ourselves in having
a single source of truth.
How do you connect with different departments
within IBM, deal with different silos of data?
- I was part of the team at Dell that helped roll out
Salesforce to our sales organization.
And now we are at
IBM doing the same exact thing.
And so that's one way that we can get
one source of the truth and all get on the same page
in terms of the tools that we're using.
But the other thing that I observed when I came
to IBM, and it's so common
in big B2B tech organizations,
is we have silos by line of business.
And we basically have 40 marketing organizations
at IBM,
which I actually want to build into
one marketing organization
that works together
to move the market.
That's a big change
that we're thinking about doing
and your tools actually underpin a big part of that.
I also know that you're an advocate for
women in leadership.
And I hear in Texas you've been a big part
of the conference here.
Share that with us, please.
- I've been
a chair of the board for the last several years.
A lot of people elevated me along the way
and I love elevating others.
And the conference is just a really
remarkable way to do that at scale.
- And when was the first time that you saw
leaders that looked like you?
- My mom.
My mom was a working mom, Latina.
She was a manager of a furniture showroom
surrounded by men and five-feet tall.
And she held her own.
So I think that's the very first time.
I feel a very strong responsibility
to pay that forward.
I feel so fortunate. As an immigrant
I feel like I won a lottery ticket being here.
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We'll see you next time.