She’s earned the No. 1 spot in our annual ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Business. But to keep Big Blue growing, Rometty will have to sell IBM like never before.

By Jessi Hempel, senior writer

FORTUNE — Ginni Rometty’s first customer conference as CEO of IBM (IBM) was an unusual affair, especially by Big Blue’s buttoned-up standards. The June confab took place in an airy loft in Manhattan’s hip Chelsea neighborhood. When the tiny elevator arrived to whisk a group of us to the meeting space, the doors opened and there was Rometty, flanked by a couple of visibly nervous assistants. "Really good to see you!" she said, clasping my hand warmly as her handlers checked their watches. The presentation was about to begin and Rometty still wasn’t wearing her microphone. "Isn’t this neat?" she asked.

The program started late. At 5-foot-11, with blond hair tucked behind a headband, Rometty, 55, has an almost regal bearing, but on this day she flubbed her entrance, bounding onto the stage before she could be introduced. She laughed it off. When an audience member’s ringing cellphone interrupted the events, she joked, "I hope that isn’t mine!"

You wouldn’t catch Lou Gerstner or Sam Palmisano trying to smooth over someone else’s faux pas. Rometty’s two predecessors also are unlikely to have hosted a sales meeting in a loft, and they definitely wouldn’t have described the proceedings as "neat." But they surely would have approved of Rometty’s agenda that June day. She had assembled some familiar faces, the chief information officers who buy billions of dollars of software, tech services, and hardware from IBM (No. 19 on the Fortune 500), but she had also invited their chief marketing officers. (Thus the trendy venue.) Her ambitious — and yes, unusual — plan: Get the marketers to use IBM tools to sort their data for nuggets that will help them better reach customers and sell more stuff.

MORE: Ginni Rometty – No. 1 Most Powerful Women in Business

When Rometty (pronounced RAH-metty) became IBM’s ninth CEO — and its first woman chief executive — she took control of the 19th-largest company in the world by revenue (2011 sales surpassed $107 billion) and, at presstime, the fifth largest by valuation, with a market cap of $235 billion. Her influence on the world of technology and her company’s impact on the financial markets earn her the No. 1 spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Business. She inherits a company with an enviable growth record for its enormous size. Over the past decade, the company has increased profits by an average 16% every year, returning 12% annually to shareholders.

She also needs to live up to almost ridiculously high expectations: IBM has said it will add $20 billion more in revenue growth in the next three years. To put that in perspective, that’s a business roughly the size of Nike (NKE), No. 136 on the Fortune 500.

Not that any of this is a surprise to Rometty, a 31-year veteran of IBM who is known to have thick binders of background material and data prepared for her in advance of meetings. Indeed, the most surprising thing about her June customer debut was how loose and improvisational it was. She’s not a stiff — "There’s nothing imperious or imperial about her," notes Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter — but Rometty rarely leaves anything to chance. For example, she declined to be interviewed in person for this article, and would answer questions only via e-mail.

Rometty was at Palmisano’s side for much of his decade-long tenure, and became a serious candidate to succeed him about four years ago. And she was personally involved in setting the high bar that she must now clear. She and other senior leaders helped him develop the five-year plan — dubbed "2015 Roadmap" — that has IBM targeting more than $125 billion in revenue that year.

For Rometty the challenge of meeting that goal is only partly about inventing new technologies to sell to her existing clients. Growth at IBM’s scale also means creating new markets, much the way it did with its Smarter Planet campaign, which sold nontechies such as mayors and police chiefs on the idea of using software to monitor and manage traffic, water systems, and sanitation trucks. Now Rometty is making a similar pitch to marketing executives, promising that technology will change the way they do their jobs. It won’t be an easy sell: Marketers are less apt than bureaucrats to be wowed by a charismatic CEO or statistics about petabytes. Many are accustomed to seeing computing as a tool to support their creative endeavors, not the starting point.

While social media has rapidly integrated itself into our everyday personal and professional lives, with a quarter of us belonging to at least two social networks, it appears that, for the moment at least, we still prefer engaging with friends, family and colleagues face-to-face than we do online.

Seven out of ten respondents to a recent study said that conversations with both individuals (72 percent) and small groups (70 percent) are richer when they occur in person than online, and two-thirds (67 percent) said that they do not use social media for any business or professional purposes.

Just a little over one-third (37 percent) said that social media has improved the way that they communicate with people in their personal life, and less than one-quarter (23 percent) said that these channels have improved their business or professional relationships.

The theme of the president’s 2012 reelection campaign is that George W. Bush left such a terrible mess that Barack Obama could hardly be expected to clean it up in four years. In other words, 44 months of unemployment rates above 8 percent, $5 trillion in new borrowing, $16 trillion in aggregate debt, gas prices of nearly $4 per gallon, a dive in average family income, and involvement in two wars were all due to George Bush and simply too difficult for anyone to overcome. So Obama cannot be judged on his record between 2009 and 2012.

At first glance, this is a most unusual claim. Gerald Ford followed the mess of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo. After serving for less than three years, he failed to win reelection. His successor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to make a bad situation even worse. He exited four years later, tagged with a high “misery index” fueled by rampant unemployment and roaring inflation. Ronald Reagan took office under Carter’s baleful legacy but ran for reelection successfully in 1984 based not on “Carter did it,” but on the recovery he engineered.

Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on “It’s the economy, stupid,” and he was reelected four years later after claiming credit for boom times. George W. Bush inherited the aftershocks of the dot-com meltdown and a country ill-equipped to respond to terrorist assaults after the nonchalance of the 1990s. Despite the 9/11 attacks, Bush was reelected on the themes of a good economy and a safer country. Blaming or praising presidents for their four years of governance is an American tradition. That is why Obama asserted at the outset that if he could not turn around the economy, his presidency would be a “one-term proposition.”

Vatican City, Sep 8, 2012 / 05:12 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican has teamed up with Apple to develop new hi-tech methods for communicating the works of Pope Benedict XVI to the world. “It represents an enormous step on the international stage because, as you know, internet goes beyond space and time,” said Father Giuseppe […]

Social media has revolutionized the business world and has quickly established itself as the primary source of recruitment for companies worldwide, and with good reason – it’s cost-effective, fast and scalable, allowing organizations of all shapes and sizes to source potential hires and easily profile their characters.

Indeed, 92 percent of U.S. companies have used social networks to find new talent, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of those surveyed have made successful hires through these channels.

As you might expect, LinkedIn leads the way, with 93 percent of socially-savvy employers using this platform for talent acquisition, ahead of Facebook (66 percent) and Twitter (54 percent). Companies listed professional organization membership and charity work as their preferred employee characteristics, with posts and tweets about illegal drugs, sexual activity and profanity being the top three no-nos.

This infographic from Intricate takes a closer look at social media’s effect on employee recruitment.

  The Cigarette law in Lebanon is an excellent step towards a clean environment, and improved health;   I propose  a slight modifiction of the law:   1- The Cigarette banning law in Lebanon should be slighltly modified to allow bars\Coffee shops that can prove their profit is mainly based on smoking Nargile, Cigarettes or […]

Did you know that there are more devices connected to the internet than there are people on Earth?

Yes, some of these belong to drug dealers. But beyond this unfortunate truism, the massive rise in affordable, portable technology has meant that we – all of us – are now empowered to react to the events around us in a real time basis. We are now the journalists. We are now part of the story. For the first time in history, the power is with us.

The examples go on and on. The ground operation that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden broke first on Twitter. Tweets about earthquakes reach people 30 seconds before they feel the tremors. Ten million online signatures and three million emails shut down SOPA. In January of this year, Facebook saw six times more traffic than Google.

This infographic takes a closer look at how social media and the internet bring power to the people.

6 hours ago  •  Malek Khazen Dear Editor: I came to support Tommy Thompson when I learned about his dedication to the protection of the dignity of every human life, his passion and love for the Badger State and his experience that will help him get things done from Day One. As governor, Tommy was […]

Endorsement of the Catholic-Maronite Foundation, Malek Khazen – Support to Tommy Thompson!

Tommy has a clear plan from first day in Congress to implement. He will be the leader that Wisconsin and US need  by implementing clear policies some example: 1) support to Paul Ryan‘s Path to Prosperity plan. 2)  Tommy is the only candidate in this race who will cap both federal spending, and as importantly revenues, keeping government in-check on both sides of the equation. As a governor he succeeded to create many jobs, cutting spending, simplifying tax reform and   3) Tommy’s proposed budget process reform would hold senators accountable for passing a budget — failure to do so would result in a forfeiture of the senators pay.  Every person and office holder need to take responsibility of their actions! 4) Finally each vote is key for Wisconsin and the nation: implement "real" solutions without having other people or government decide your future and Health insurance.

Khazen,org  and Wisconsin Catholic-Maronite Foundation is proud to offer its endorsement to the Romney Ryan ticket of 2012! And Governor Tommy Thompson as of the senate race.

I just returned from the Romney/Ryan campaign event in Norfolk, Virginia. The crowd was massive, enthusiastic and hopeful. I don’t know what I expected – but what I experienced far exceeded those expectations. Mitt Romney’s bold choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate ensures that an exchange of correspondence between the Cardinal of New York and the Republican Vice Presidential nominee will now become a part of framing the issues in what promises to be one of the most important Presidential contests in U.S. history. The principles of Catholic Social Teaching and their application have now entered the 2012 campaign.

When Presidential candidate Mitt Romney approached the podium and began to speak, he was warm, sincere, comfortable and confident. In fact, he was, "presidential" in his demeanor.  He was introduced by the Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, whose gifts continue to mature in office. I could not help but think that I was listening to Governor McDonnell that I was listening to the next Attorney General of the United States – if Mitt Romney is elected to the presidency in November.

However, it was Romney’s introduction of his Vice Presidential selection which wowed the crowd. Here is an excerpt from his remarks:  "Today we take another step forward in helping restore the promise of America. As we move forward in this campaign and on to help lead the nation to better days, it is an honor to announce my running mate and the next Vice President of the United States: Paul Ryan."

"Paul Ryan is a leader. His leadership begins with character and values. And Paul is a man of tremendous character, shaped in large part by his early life. Paul’s father died when he was in high school. That forced him to grow up earlier than any young man should. But Paul did, with the help of his devoted mother, his brothers and sister, and a supportive community. And as he did, he internalized the virtues and hard-working ethic of the Midwest…" "He does not demonize his opponents. He understands that honorable people can have honest differences. And he appeals to the better angels of our nature. There are a lot of people in the other party who might disagree with Paul Ryan; I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t respect his character and judgment."