Good Power

3

Listening to My Heart

My blind date picked me up in a dark-red Mercury Cougar. He was tall, light-haired, with brown eyes, and a quick smile. All I knew about Mark Rometty was that he was four years older than me—I had just turned nineteen—and that he worked for an automotive industry supplier in Detroit.

It was the first summer of my GM internship and I was renting a sparse room with a friend in a house that overlooked a cement plant. The woman who owned the house had set my friend and me up on separate blind dates—an attempt to get us to leave while she threw a party—and even though I had a boyfriend back at Northwestern I saw no harm in one night out.

Mark took me for dinner at a yacht club on the lake, where he proudly admitted he could ...