Networking has been cited as the number one unwritten rule of success in business. Who you know really impacts what you know.
Sallie Krawcheck
Assume the best intent in others around you. You will often be right, and even when you're not, people can rise to your view of them. Not always, but enough that I believe it's worth it.
To empower women, power must be given to them, presumably by an entity that already has it. And that entity is the patriarchy. This also implies that women must be on the receiving end, waiting - politely - to be empowered. Very Victorian-era courtship, isn't it?
We all know money is power. And women won't be equal with men until we are financially equal with men. Getting more money into the hands of women is good for women, but it's also good for their families, for the economy, and for society.
Albert Einstein is reported to have said compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Obviously, a dollar invested in your 20s is worth so much more than a dollar invested in your 60s.
You know those days at the office when you used to come in and not really do much? You don't get days like that as an entrepreneur. If you don't do the work you need to, nothing happens that needs to. It's that simple.
If your idea is truly innovative, you're going to hear from the naysayers. After all, if it really were such a good idea, someone would have already done it, right?
If you are a senior woman in business, you intuitively know two things: If a white man promotes a woman or a person of color, he gets credit for it. If a woman says great things about a woman, you get dinged for it. Research is clear on this.
I'm a Weeble. Remember Weebles? The toy whose tagline was, 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down?' I'm resilient. Oh, and I work really hard.
There are a lot of things in business that are completely out of your control, but hard work isn't one of them.
Women aren't driven by or thrilled by outperforming the market. They're much more excited about, 'Can I meet my goal?'
As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.
You may find it more relaxing to work with people just like you, but entrepreneurship is about finding new approaches to problems, and discomfort can be an important part of that process.
One of my passions is women in business and helping women to get ahead in business. For women, that feedback loop can be broken. Women won't get as much feedback from male bosses as men will get. Therefore, they have to make an extra effort, whether that is unfortunate, good, bad, indifferent.
Investing isn't a game to be won. At the end of the day, it's a way to achieve your big goals, like buying that home, starting that business, and retiring on your own terms.
The research indicates that when we women invest, we women do tend to be more patient, take a longer-term perspective and as a result of it, tend to be better investors than men. But the messages we get are that investing is sort of 'the guys' world.'
Like many entrepreneurs, I never have two days that are alike. One thing that's consistent is I wake up early, around 4:30 A.M. It's my most productive time of day because I can think and work uninterrupted.
Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.
Leadership is a lot of hard work. I hoped, when I was younger, that I would just be a natural leader or that it was something that was innate, but it is really a learned skill.
Recognize that the issues we face as women advancing in business are issues my grandmother would have loved to have had. And fight the good fight nonetheless. For yourself and your peers - but also for your daughter, when it's her turn.
Follow the money at all costs, and you might wind up regretting it.
I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.
First, pay off your high-interest-rate debt. If you have student loan debt - that's low interest rate; that has a tax benefit - you can leave that out. A mortgage can be an OK one. Credit card debt is poison. That needs to be paid off right away.
Stop hoping for a promotion that's not coming. Instead, start a business at which you want to work.
Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.
I make it a priority to keep in touch with people with whom I've worked in the past. And I'm fortunate, because I've worked with some terrific folks.
Most financial questions don't have one right answer - just an answer that's right for you.
In the old world of business, there was often just one seat at the leadership table for women, two at best. That meant that only so many women could advance. But in a world where women recognize the power that they own - and where technology can upend the traditional rules of engagement - one woman winning doesn't mean another loses.
When I feel risk-averse, I am much more likely to surround myself with middle-aged, professional, southern females; I just am.
My advice for folks on networking is give, give, give. You will later receive. But you are really planting these seeds. Some of them will die, and they won't become anything. Many of them will take many, many years before they pay off for you if at all.
I've taken a few public hits in my career, and I never hid the pain of it from my children. Nor did I hide the regrouping and rethinking that occurred after each one. After all, that process allowed me to re-emerge and go on to build a more impactful - and more engaging - career path than the one I had been knocked off of.
The whole icon of a bull that stands for Wall Street - you couldn't come up with an image of a more male environment. Women feel that the brand doesn't speak to them.
Women bring some great qualities to work. We bring risk-awareness. We bring a greater focus on relationships. We bring more holistic decision-making than gentlemen do. We bring a more long-term perspective than gentlemen do. We tend to look for meaning and purpose in our jobs to a greater degree than gentlemen do.
If you are going to fire this person or hire that person, do it all in a concentrated period. The Band-Aid gets ripped off, and everybody goes back to work.
I never talk about my money! It is interesting how awkward it is to talk about it, even though I talk about it in the abstract every day.
We shouldn't think anyone needs a Ph.D. in advanced investing in order to begin to invest.
Whatever your income level is, save as much as you can - up to 20 percent, but more if you can - and invest it. Put that into an IRA; put that into a brokerage account.
People just haven't saved enough for retirement. And they're going to outlive their money.
The only time in my career I've lost sleep - wake up 3:30 in the morning, and you know you're not going back to sleep - is when I've been an entrepreneur. Even in the financial crisis.
I love to talk. I love to share. I love to vent. But I prefer action.
We just haven't had enough women in senior roles on Wall Street overall - fewer women in the investment banking function overall as well.
I've managed many people in my career. I've managed very diverse teams. And it's interesting because what I've found over time is that when it would come to bonus time or raise time, I would hear from the gentlemen, 'I want to make X.' I don't think I ever heard from a woman who worked for me, 'I want to make X.'
What you hear and what the research shows is that gentlemen negotiate for their first job. Women do not negotiate from their first job and on. And I tell women there is no H.R. fairy godmother. There might be, but you better not count on it.
I never really considered myself much of a feminist until I left Wall Street. I did all the right things - such as put together gender-diverse teams - but feminism wasn't deep in my bones.
The 'aha' moment came one to me one morning when I was applying my mascara, and I realized that the retirement crisis is actually a woman's crisis: Women live longer than men yet retire with less money.
The Ellevest target client is the professional woman who either has her own money or has agency over her family's money. She is among the 75 million women in the U.S. workforce who want to take financial control and is looking for a straightforward way to achieve her dreams on her own terms.
I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.
My low point was after being reorganized out of running Merrill Lynch. That dismissal deeply contradicted my sense of fairness, since, at the time, my team and I had done what we were brought in to do: We had turned Merrill Lynch around from the depths of the financial crisis.
People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.
My kindest interpretation of my younger self is, 'Boy, was I busy.' I had two kids, a husband, two stepkids. I mean, how many darn things can a person do at the end of the day?
