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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Justin Fox and I'm talking today with Sam Paul Masano,

the former CEO of IBM.

I did an interview with Sam for the June issue of HBR,

titled Managing Investors. He also has a new book out,

Rethink, a Path to the Future. Sam, welcome to Ideacast.

Justin, thank you for having me.

Sam, I came to your office a couple months ago

to interview for our magazine

about the challenges as a CEO of dealing with Wall Street.

And I kind of expected you to grape a lot,

but you didn't. Why not? Well, I think quite. of came to the conclusion over time that fundamentally Wall Street and the investor are your owners and you

need to come up with a strategy to kind of work as best you can with the investment community.

And early on a CEO, was that a problem?

Well, I think quite honestly, as I learned it was an IBM problem, not necessarily Wall Street's problem. We were too confusing to them and so therefore

we found we needed to give them something that worked for us in our management system and our strategy, but also was simpler and clearer

so they could decide what investments they would like to make.

...