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.

One of my biggest regrets in coaching was my eighth or ninth game of my career. I was wound up about a conference game in December - I was wound up tight, and we ended up playing really tight. Our players were bickering with the officials, I was bickering... and then all of a sudden we lose.

By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thinking has not shifted measurably since that time.

I used to sneak into the Forum to watch the Lake Show, when I lived in L.A. with my pop. I was born in Seattle, and for fourth, and fifth grade, I went to L.A., then I came back to Seattle and then back to L.A. for eighth, ninth, and 10th grade. But it was easy to sneak in the Forum, like really easy.

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.

Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.

I never went to high school. I never really finished eighth grade. I was kicked out of seventh grade once and eighth grade twice. Mainly for not showing up and not doing it. Then I went to an alternative high school for part of what would have been ninth grade and part of what would have been 10th grade.

It's possible to spend every waking hour here on the ninth floor and not get out of the office. And this isn't the real world in here. And contrary to public opinion, I'm not incredibly poll-driven. They are an ongoing indicator of how we are going, but I take the feedback I get on the street as being the most important.

It was the first time I was looking, really, right after the storm, that I saw maybe the amount of devastation that had happened in the Lower Ninth Ward. Where my friends lived, which was about six blocks from where the industrial canal was, houses was smashed into houses, and there were, like, four houses smashed together.

Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry.

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.

My dad, as a guy, had to quit school in the ninth grade, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. And spent his life pushing wheel barrels of heavy wet cement. So we've gone from pushing cement to now in one generation pushing legislation. But we always want any president to succeed, to do well; that means America does well and Americans do well.

Share This Page