Barbara Humpton’s farewell as Siemens USA CEO

Editor’s note: This is an edited narrative version of the Optimistic Outlook podcast featuring former Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton. In her final episode serving as host before retiring as CEO on September 30, 2025, Humpton handed the mic to renowned journalist Steve Clemons, founder and CEO of Widehall. Clemons interviewed Humpton about her five years hosting Optimistic Outlook, her reflections on leadership, and the optimism that has guided her career.

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Steve Clemons
You've been hosting the optimistic outlook for about five years. I am an addict—a very, very compelled listener. You have moved the needle on my own optimism. So I want to thank you. But the podcast started as a pandemic project back when many people at Siemens were working from home and the world wasn't looking particularly cheery. Tell me about the evolution of this podcast. How did you get it started? And why did you put your focus on optimism?

Barbara Humpton
We all have to accept reality, right? We have to be grounded in it. And what happened during COVID was we had members of the Siemens communications team who realized everyone was disconnected, yet we weren’t sure what we could do. It felt overwhelming, as it did for everyone around the world.

Early in the pandemic one of the Siemens communications team leads, Dickson Mercer, came to me and said, “I've got an idea for a podcast,” and it suddenly felt really right. We didn't know what to name it yet, but what he knew was that if we could start talking to people about things that we can control in a world where there were so many things we couldn't control, if we could keep people focused on getting busy and moving the needle, we knew that there'd be an audience for that.

Steve Clemons
COVID was really imposing harshness on everything, and you were going to give people a sense of agency at a time when it felt lacking. But maybe people thought a CEO doing a podcast was a little crazy. How did your world look at this podcast? How did your bosses look at it, at the very beginning?

Barbara Humpton
I was just thrilled with their reaction. We really did need to get our message out because Siemens was playing a critical role throughout the pandemic. And here I was talking via the podcast to an audience made up of people who truly were leaders in various fields. The reaction from my colleagues at Siemens, particularly our global leadership, was excellent.

I was plenty used to talking to people inside Siemens, but to reach an external audience also has been really meaningful to me. I’ve been encountering industry people who say, “Hey, I'm a fan of the show.”

Steve Clemons
This podcast—this show—has become huge. Can you walk me through some of the most memorable, notable, interesting personalities and exchanges you've had over these five years?

Barbara Humpton
My podcast team and I have created something like 73 episodes. I’ve had numerous business leaders on the podcast, people like Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, who was working on sustainable aviation.

Then there have been guests who were government leaders, such as Anthony Foxx, former Secretary of Transportation; Mayor Hancock of Denver; Lisa Blunt Rochester now serving as U.S. Senator representing Delaware. Most recently I hosted U.S. Congressman Jay Obernolte, who was critical in establishing the congressional approach to regulating AI.

I encourage the audience to listen to those earlier podcasts because so many of these discussions are evergreen, because the key projects that we work on, the things that we're changing right now in America, are going to take decades to change.

Steve Clemons
Have any of your guests tested your optimism?

Barbara Humpton
One podcast that really got me thinking was an episode about Project Drawdown—this idea that we can put technologies into the world that will actually start to consume the carbon that's been emitted and draw down those factors that are changing our environment so drastically.

And I’ve had guests like Christiana Figueres, who was the person at the Conference of Parties (COP) in Paris to convince the delegates to make climate commitments. She has her own podcast, Optimism + Outrage, focused on climate change, which just shows that, yes, it's a good thing to be optimistic about the future, and it's another thing to get active.

Steve Clemons
You and I were at one of our “AI for Real” events recently at Climate Week NYC 2025. I'm really blown away by the resilience of the resilience industry, especially at a time when so many agreements around the world are being reshuffled, and some canceled. They reflect your optimistic core.

Barbara Humpton
Climate Week this year was phenomenal. It’s obvious that the business community is stepping up in a very big way. One of the things I’ve tried to do on the podcast is recognize that if we’re going to be strong and resilient over the long haul, sometimes we have to pause and think about what we’ve accomplished, then refocus and keep moving. It’s amazing what will happen when you keep driving action. One of my podcast guests was Eduardo Briceño, an expert in the growth mindset, who helps us understand that when we have a growth mindset and recognize that we are becoming something different than we were before, we can actually manage our own attitudes as we move through disruption. I also interviewed Summer Anderson, an executive advisor who wrote the book Start Within about how building trust through effective communication improves ROI.

Steve Clemons
What are your thoughts on leadership, especially given that you've created a template for including different kinds of conversations and communications in the leadership model? Can what you have done with communication go on to become more of a norm for leaders in business?

Barbara Humpton
One thing I will tell you, whether you're running a company with 45,000 people in all 50 states, like Siemens, or if you're running an organization with 100 people, is the fact is there's not enough time to talk to each individual. So what I've loved about the podcast is that it is an avenue for sharing perspectives and getting people aligned around ideas. I found out about a year ago that teams around Siemens would gather, maybe over lunch, to listen to new episodes—that just blew my mind. So the podcast will keep going—listeners will hear all kinds of optimistic voices from across Siemens hosting the show to make sure that the company continues to send out its message.

Steve Clemons
I’m interested in how you became the CEO of Siemens USA. What was your track? And, what are the replicable lessons of your journey?

Barbara Humpton
My journey started when I thought I would be a math professor like my parents. But IBM came to Wake Forest University to recruit every math major they could find. Why? Because it was the beginning of the computer age and they needed people who could be trained to be programmers. I went on to get involved in programs that were critical to national security—from classified stuff to the global positioning system to biometrics for the FBI—and I was hooked.

I was involved in missions that mattered, and I loved it. I never thought, though, that I would end up being a leader in a business. My math background made me pretty good as a programmer, but I knew that what I loved doing was bringing together teams of very disparate backgrounds. You get the engineers and the architects and the programmers and the testers and put them all together, and then you get everybody's perspective, meaning you get better products out at the end. I loved coordinating and integrating.

What I especially loved was when you could take on a really difficult situation that everybody else was running away from. You could run to the problem with a bunch of smart people and fix it up. Because there was nothing better than accomplishing something and afterwards people saying, “I didn't think you could do that.”

So as far as a lesson, what I say to people is: pay a lot of attention as you're going through jobs that you have from day to day and figure out what you find fun. Pay attention to what causes you to lose track of the time because these are the things that put you in the flow. These are the things that you could and should try to do more of.

After 27 years with IBM, which had sold its business to Lockheed Martin, I grew through responsibility and ended up with a true portfolio of business. Then I got the invitation to join Siemens.

I didn't really know Siemens, so I went to the library to get its annual report, asking myself, "What does this company do?" What I realized was that while I had been working at a company focused on national security, Siemens was and is focused on global security: How do we address the megatrends like climate change, urbanization, the aging demographics of everyone, everywhere, and the digitalization of everything?

Steve Clemons
I have to ask: Are you a secret gamer? Is there an avatar out there, like Optimistic Barb or Optimistic CEO in the game?

Barbara Humpton
I prefer “Extreme Fighter Barb.” But, no, I’m not a gamer. I’m a puzzler. I love doing all the puzzles, like the puzzles that the New York Times tees up for its regular readers and viewers.

But as the person who has lived the “Optimistic Outlook,” I’d really like to make sure people notice something about Siemens. A lot of people have thought of us as a conglomerate. Right. There's the buildings business. There's the industry business. But if you look closely, what you'll see is the same technology in action across all our businesses, one that combines the real and the digital.

This is at the heart of everything that we address at Siemens. For instance, how do you make buildings better? You gather data and then apply AI and actually produce new building services. How do you make manufacturing better? By gathering data and using AI and driving automation differently. That core technology is the industrial AI that Siemens is introducing to the world. We’re working to create the new industrial tech sector; it's orders of magnitude bigger than the tech sector that's been delivered so far.

Steve Clemons
In terms of the promise of industrial AI, how is the world going to look different in terms of jobs and how can thinking about that be an optimistic thing?

Barbara Humpton
I’m encouraging people to think not just about how to apply technology as they always have, but instead to think differently and ask what is something that we've never been able to dream of doing that we can now do with AI tools. When we do that, we're going to be introducing new ways of living, new ways of working, and new ways of interacting with the world and with each other. It's all going to enrich our lives in really dramatic ways. We are so fortunate to be living at this time when these kinds of breakthroughs are available to us.

Steve Clemons
What’s your North Star in leadership and thinking in managing some of the challenges to technological progress?

Barbara Humpton
When challenges crop up what I like to do first is just pause for as long as I can and say, yep, this is reality. Now what are we going to do?

What I've learned over the years is that if you have really smart people around you and you're very transparent about what is that hurdle we're dealing with, people come up with the most creative solutions. I was told once mid-career that IBM must have instilled this in a lot of us who were there, the mental practice of actually picking up a problem and looking at it from multiple angles. Sometimes the easiest way to solve something is to discover that it's not a problem at all, but an opportunity, right? Because of this disruption, we now have the opportunity to change something that we've been wanting to change for a while. So that pause is probably the most important first thing. Stop stressing about the things that aren't in our control. Start devoting all our energy to what do we do next.

Steve Clemons
I confess that just in our discussion here, I think you have moved me successfully from being a gritty realist to a gritty optimist.

Barbara Humpton
I love it.

Steve Clemons
Now I’m going to ask you the question you’ve asked of many of your guests on the podcast: As you start the next chapter, what's the optimistic outlook you want to share with your audience?

Barbara Humpton
We must recognize that we’re living in a time when we have the resources we need and we have the creativity we need to overcome any challenges that face us. In light of that, what I'm most optimistic about is what I've seen in terms of ecosystems.

In the past we've often thought we were competing against one another. I prefer to think that we together are competing against the challenges we're faced with. And when we do that, what we discover is that several companies can do well at the same time, right? Several teams can do well at the same time. Several individuals can do well at the same time. Often, we are actually growing the pie rather than fighting over many, many slices of some mini, mini pie.

Published: October 9, 2025