Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don't have a bachelor's degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates' skills instead of their degree status. Drawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a "skills-first" approach to hiring and managing talent. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials; creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees; collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool; helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking; bringing on board a critical mass of non­degreed workers; and building a supportive organizational culture. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach-and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.

Ginni Rometty has spent 36 years at IBM, where she now serves as president, CEO, and chairman of the board. She is on a protracted mission to reinvent the company as a cloud-based "solutions" business. That transformation involves moving into areas that have higher value and shedding ones that don't. IBM's new businesses around cloud, data, and security account for almost $34 billion in revenue. They're growing by more than 13% a year and constitute 42% of the company. In this interview Rometty says that IBM is trying to "unlock" the 80% of data behind the firewalls of client companies so that those organizations can use it to make better decisions, adding, "There's a $2 trillion market around better decision making." She talks about why IBM's earnings have declined for 20 consecutive quarters, what kinds of employees the company's new course demands, gender-related challenges in her career, and more.