花旗CFO：从犯错中学习

Please join me in welcoming Jeff Colvin and Sallie Krawcheck.

I wanna ask you a little about your own career starting with the fact that Wall Street is not just a mainly male environment; it is an aggressively male, an aggressively macho environment. Is it an advantage or a disadvantage to be a woman in that world?

There's something about having gone, gone to an all-girl school in Charleston South Carolina. It was tougher than Wall Street. (Yeah.) You don't know what it was like. I had the glasses, literally 1, the glasses, braces 2, corrective shoes, right, half Jewish half sort of a waspy. I, I couldn't have been a further outcast. I have all the stories, and they mocked. It was, it was not pretty, it was not good...(Girl, girls are tougher than boys),(right?), girls are tough. (yah, I've heard this, that..) Girls are tough. There was nothing they could do to me at Salomon Brothers ( the company she used to work in Wall Street) in the 80's that was as tough as what happened at Ashley Hall (the school she went to)in seventh grade. Awful.

You have said that everybody makes one false step coming out of biz schools. (Sure) what was it in your case?

My, my false step coming out of business school was I couldn't, I actually couldn't find a job coming out of business school. My mistake was as a young investment banker er, I became very happily and joyfully 3 pregnant. But rather than doing what I would advise any young lady to do, it's ok you know. Work out the hours, work out you know, maybe you could go, not work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and try to figure out can you go to another department, if it's not working. I quit, full-out, quit. Right, no plans and it took me about two weeks to realize that I had, I didn't mean to quit. I further compounded my error by trying to interview to go back to work on Wall Street while very pregnant. (Tough) It didn't work. (It didn't work) It didn't work, I've been rejected by every firm, every firm on Wall Street. The great news about it is, is that I spent the time sort of stewing 4, right, and it was during that year that I had off that it hit me. I want to be a research analyst 5. I'm not sure if I hadn't taken the time and thought, really thought about what I liked and didn't like, I would have found the right path. And the other lesson is you can try to kill a career, but if you are persistent 6 to get back in, there,there may not be anything as career suicide.

Now, you were a research analyst. That is largely a solitary 7 job. You went from that to becoming the CEO of Sanford C. Bernstein. Suddenly you were leading 400 people. What was the most important element in making that change successful?

To be an analyst, to be a successful analyst, to your point, solitary, fine. But you actually have to, you have that healthy ego 8, right? You have to want to be ... want to embrace the spotlight 9, say it's ok for people to look at me, it's ok for me to be out there, make mistakes. The job of running the business was very different, it had to then be completely turned to other people and I think a lot of folks stumble on the transition because they move from "It's all about me" to "No, it's all about you". And now what I'll be very excited about is that Jeff is successful, not that Sallie is successful.

You seem to have a particularly easy, erh, particular ability to be blunt, to be frank. Do you have any insight into why it's easy for you, or why it's hard for so many other people?

You know what? What's the worst thing that's gonna happen? Right? If, if you don't tell the truth and you don't act ethically 10, you don't deliver the bad news. There's a lot of downside there. Right? And, and careers are ruined, and reputations are ruined. The worst thing that can happen is if I tell you something you don't want to hear, is you don't like me. Right? Or, I get maybe, you know, my job, maybe I'll get fired. That's not so bad.