“Growth and comfort don't coexist. That's true for people, for companies, for nations.”
Growth and Comfort Don't Coexist
From Ginni Rometty’s remarks at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel on October 7, 2014, reported by Andrew Nusca for Fortune. Rometty was about three years into her tenure as IBM’s CEO and used the line to frame a roughly $6 billion divestiture and the pivot toward cloud, mobile, and data analytics; Warren Buffett was in the audience.
Rometty had already used the line at the 2011 Most Powerful Women Summit, before she was CEO. She introduced it then as “Someone once told me growth and comfort do not coexist,” closing a story about a job offered early in her career that her first instinct was to decline. By 2014 she was pointing the same line at a 430,000-person company, and the immediate target of the discomfort it justified was IBM itself.