The first two people Maria Bartolome Winans called after accepting the chief marketing job at Kyndryl were her parents. It was a telling instinct. The assignment looked corporate from a distance: IBM was separating its managed infrastructure services business into an independent public company. Up close, it was personal. Her parents had already taught her what it meant to carry an identity across a border, to keep the useful parts of an inheritance and still make a life that belonged to you.
Winans was born in Santiago, Chile, to a Chilean mother and Spanish father. At 10, she moved with her parents and two siblings to North Carolina, where her father pursued doctoral work at Duke University. The family arrived without English. She wanted, for a while, to disappear into the crowd. Her parents kept Spanish alive at home. Her mother told her that her culture, history and language would become advantages. The lesson took time to ripen.
Decades later, Winans would face a version of the same problem at industrial scale. Nearly 90,000 people were leaving a globally recognized name in business. Their systems, customers and expertise remained. Their institutional identity did not. Kyndryl needed a name, a visual language, a market position and a culture. It also needed those employees to believe that a spinoff was a beginning rather than an administrative subtraction.
The call that broke the pattern
By the time Martin Schroeter called, Winans had spent 29 years at IBM. She had started after college in sales, working with laptops, computers and servers. Three years in, her Spanish and cross-cultural fluency helped open assignments connected to Latin America and Europe. Marketing eventually gave her a home for the two subjects she studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: business administration and art.
The combination had once seemed divided. She loved painting, sculpture and the act of making something memorable. She also liked mathematics, science and the logic of a market. In marketing, creative judgment and commercial evidence stopped competing. She moved through IBM roles across sales, strategy and global marketing, contributed to initiatives including Smarter Commerce and Watson, and ultimately became CMO for IBM Americas, responsible for marketing across North and Latin America.
Schroeter was forming the new company and was its only employee. He asked Winans to help build the brand, organization and culture. The conversation lasted about 30 minutes. Her answer came inside the call. She later compressed the decision into five words: “You got me on Hello.”
“I am not afraid of taking a risk. I am afraid of regret.”Maria Bartolome Winans
Leaving after nearly three decades was not a rejection of IBM. It was a chance to spend that accumulated experience on a blank page. Winans understood the old structure, the customer relationships and the anxieties inside the separation. She also saw what independence unlocked: a services company could work across a broader ecosystem instead of being bounded by one vendor's portfolio.
A company name is a compact argument
The naming team explored a wide field of possibilities before arriving at Kyndryl. The chosen word joined two images. “Kyn” evoked kinship, the trusted relationships that hold a services business together. “Dryl” drew from tendril, a plant reaching outward as it grows. The unusual spelling made the name ownable. The meaning made it teachable.
The distinction mattered because the business did not primarily sell a piece of hardware or software. Its work lived in the expertise of people who designed, ran and modernized mission-critical systems. A human name gave the company room to talk about trust, growth and partnership without pretending the technology was simple.
But a name could not carry the entire separation. Winans had two urgent tasks on day one: establish a brand customers could recognize and motivate a workforce that had spent years inside another institution. The same listening process served both. Her team interviewed customers and employees, asking what they valued, what worried them and how the new company should behave.
Anticipate what comes next instead of waiting to react.
01Listen closely, understand context and collaborate with trust.
02Bring personal care to the success of customers and colleagues.
03The answers became three behaviors: restless, empathetic and devoted. Restless meant anticipating rather than merely reacting. Empathetic meant listening to colleagues and customers with attention. Devoted raised the emotional temperature above contractual commitment. Leaders carried pocket-sized books explaining the ideas. When the leadership group first met in person after pandemic restrictions, it spent a day and a half of a two-day meeting on culture.
Make the founder story tangible
The launch worked through symbols that employees could see themselves inside. Winans's team described every employee as a founder. Kyndryl partnered with One Tree Planted to plant a tree in honor of each person, making the tendril metaphor physical. A launch-day social reel thanked employees by name. When Kyndryl rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, the company pushed to let the global workforce participate virtually.
None of these gestures could settle a contract, improve a delivery process or move a share price. Their job was different. They made the organizational argument legible: you are not cargo being transferred from one company to another; you are part of the root system of the new one. For a services business, that belief had practical weight. Customers encountered Kyndryl through the skill and judgment of its people.
Winans had learned the emotional mechanics of belonging long before the spinoff. At IBM, she co-chaired the Hispanic Council and mentored Latina colleagues. At Kyndryl, she became executive sponsor of the Hispanic-Latino inclusion network. She speaks about identity through the power of “and”: Chilean and American, executive and mother, analytical and artistic. The construction avoids forcing a life into one clean label.
“I'm all the ands that I want to be. That's the power of choice.”Maria Bartolome Winans
Her view of inclusion is similarly concrete. Diversity supplies different perspectives; inclusion determines whether those perspectives enter the work. That is why mentorship, in her telling, needs sponsorship beside it. Advice matters. So does having someone advocate for you when an opportunity is being assigned.
The personal trainer in the boardroom
Technology was not Winans's original plan. In college, she earned money teaching aerobics and boxing. Her classes filled up, and people told her to open a gym. She joined IBM intending to make some money before starting the fitness business. The detour lasted 29 years.
Fitness never entirely left. Winans is a certified instructor and has continued with personal training, boxing, kettlebells and circuit work. She also paints to decompress. These pursuits make her corporate philosophy easier to understand. Repetition creates capacity. A blank canvas requires a first mark. Progress depends on starting before every variable is controlled.
Winans has said she tries to act when she has about 70% of the information she needs, then trusts her judgment. Waiting for 90% can mean waiting past the useful moment.
That decision rule fits the circumstances in which Kyndryl was built. The separation unfolded during the pandemic. Employees and customers needed answers while the brand, operating model and culture were still taking shape. Perfect certainty was unavailable. Listening reduced the uncertainty; judgment closed the gap.
The brand after launch day
A launch story can turn into a museum piece if the company stops editing it. Winans has kept the Kyndryl narrative attached to the operating questions facing technology leaders. The “Double Your Impact” campaign, for example, spoke to the CIO caught between today's infrastructure and tomorrow's transformation. The message recognized a familiar tension: keep essential systems dependable while building the data, cloud and AI capabilities the board expects next.
The cultural language has continued too. Restless, empathetic and devoted give managers a shared vocabulary for how work should happen, not merely what the company sells. In 2026, Winans highlighted recognition for her marketing organization, including a Gold ANA B2 Award for an account-based marketing program and four Telly Awards connected to Kyndryl video and storytelling work. She credited the teams and partners behind the projects.
Her ambitions also point outward. She has said she wants Kyndryl to become an employer of choice, known for both expertise and culture. In 2025, she spoke about growing the company's influence in South America, with particular interest in Chile. The destination carries commercial possibility and personal symmetry.
Winans still speaks fluent Spanish, still makes Chilean empanadas and still identifies firmly with the country she left as a child. She jokes that an empanada business could make her rich one day. It is a charming alternative timeline: the nearly opened gym, the not-yet-opened food business, the marketer who kept finding bigger rooms for her mix of discipline and invention.
The useful idea in her career is not that reinvention requires erasing the past. It is that an inheritance becomes more valuable when you can choose what to carry. Her parents carried language and culture from Santiago to North Carolina. Winans carried three decades of IBM pattern recognition into Kyndryl. Then she helped tens of thousands of colleagues see that they, too, could bring expertise forward without remaining trapped in an old identity.
A brand, in this telling, is a permission structure. It tells customers what they can expect and employees how they can act. Kyndryl's first CMO made that structure from words, rituals and repeated decisions. The name was new. The people were not. The creative act was showing them how those facts could belong together.