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Fortune
Fortune
Alan Murray, David Meyer

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna's best career advice is to live every day ready to be fired

Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), in San Francisco. (Credit: David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Good morning.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna spent an hour with Fortune Connect Fellows earlier this week, discussing how he rose to the top of the 111-year old tech company, and how he aligns his personal goals with the company’s goals. His best advice to the fellows was something he said a mentor shared with him:

“You should live every day in the pleasure of getting fired…That is so freeing, and so deep…It’s definitional for me. If it's not aligned to how I want to do things, I will leave go someplace else. I have pretty good confidence that you can get kind of role, some job, somewhere. Will it be exactly the same? Probably not. But if you got to some level of fulfillment where you are, you can probably do it again. So you should never be in fear of taking one or two steps back, because if you are, then you are a hostage.”

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