Sallie Krawcheck
H: 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?
S: 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, the glasses, braces, corrective shoes,
right, half Jewish half sort of waspy.
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...
H: Girl, girls are tougher than boys, right? (Girls are tough.)
Yeah, I've heard this...
S: Girls are tough.
There was nothing they could do to me at Salomon Brothers in the 80's
that was as tough as what happened
at Ashley Hall in seventh grade.
Awful.
H: Now, you were a research analyst.
That is largely a solitary 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?
S: To be an analyst, to be a successful analyst,
to your point, solitary, fine.
But you actually have to, you have to have healthy ego, right?
You have to want to embrace the spotlight,
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.