Lady Business: Power lists, female founders, and why Sallie Krawcheck won’t run for office

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the forty-sixth issue, published October 11, 2018. 
 

Power Distractions

When friends have asked in recent months how I am, my default response has been some form of “busy!” Which is a boring and vague answer, as well as a privileged one: It means writing a book, ten or so pieces for Inc.’s October issue, editing several others, seeing some questionable theater, traveling to some fun places, and planning some big trips for the fall. So “busy” is mostly good, and welcome.

Because I’ve also been trying hard to avoid as much of the news cycle as possible. Which is a weird thing to admit, as a professional journalist! But the thing is: On Friday, briefly at home between reporting meetings, I turned on MSNBC to watch Susan Collins do her best self-congratulatory LeBron James. It was 45 deeply enraging minutes of my life that, whatever my profession, didn’t make me any more informed for watching it live, versus skimming the headline once she announced her inevitable decision.

So I welcome the big professional distractions from the breaking nonsense. One of the projects I spent my summer working on was Inc.’s inaugural list of the Female Founders 100, overseen by Inc. executive editor Danielle Sacks. It’s a power list of women in business, yes, but a pretty wide-ranging and unusual one: There are women working in hardware, software, beauty, batteries, food, fashion, finance, satellites, bras, gene therapies, robots, robotic furniture, and more.
 
One of many impressive women on the list is an executive I’ve covered for years, from her high-profile finance career to her current entrepreneurial efforts: Sallie Krawcheck, the co-founder and CEO of financial startup Ellevest. As my colleague Kimberly Weisul writes for our list, “Krawcheck jokes that she's the only person to have been fired on the front page of The Wall Street Journal--twice. But her Wall Street gigs--head of global wealth management at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and CFO of Citigroup--prepared her for her next mission: building an investing platform specifically for women.”
 
I recently caught up with Krawcheck for the first in a series of upcoming Q&As here at Lady Business, to ask about her personal spending, career successes, swearing habits--and why she’s not interested in running for office.
 

The Lady Business Interview: Sallie Krawcheck

 
What was your biggest recent splurge?
I took a non-red-eye flight back from California last week, and paid an extra $500 for it. It was a choice of get in at 11 at night, or get in at 6 a.m.--and you know, it wasn't worth the $500, but it was worth the $500.
 
What’s the last thing that made you swear at work?
Just a general conversation. No, seriously! What do you consider swearing? Because if swearing is saying something like, “What the F?” then it happened yesterday in a random conversation. If by swearing you mean I lost my temper, I cannot remember the last time. It may have been 2011. Merrill Lynch, financial crisis recovery, working for a boss who didn't feel like he appreciated me, that kind of thing. That's what it takes these days to have me lose my temper.

And what's the last thing that made you laugh at work?
I laugh at work all the time. It’s what didn't make me laugh. I had a breakfast this morning with a friend, and we were laughing/crying over the fact that these harassers get to keep coming. Every time you think it’s over, it’s not over. … It was ironic laughing, so we didn’t cry.
 
What was the first time you felt like you had a career breakthrough?
I was a brand new research associate, at Sanford Bernstein. I was two months into the job and I'd published a negative piece of research on a company called American General, when nobody published negative research. This was in the 90's, and in that era, it just was not done. I was told by other analysts et cetera not to publish it, because I would ruin my career before it even started. I did publish--and I was correct. I'll never forget being on the quarterly conference call with the company, and the number one analyst in the field bellowing at them, because he was personally wounded; he had been positive, and they had betrayed him. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. He felt personal injury, and I was sort of sitting there, figuratively filing my nails. That was my first "Oh my gosh! I might know what I'm doing."
 
More women are saying they want to enter politics. Would you ever run for office?
No. It’s funny you bring this up: There were rumors that I was being considered for Chair of the SEC in the Obama administration. Of course they told me I wasn't allowed to breathe a word, and then they leaked it. Actually it was on my friggin' birthday, and I remember the New York Times calling, and I'm standing in my apartment on the phone, and literally sweat is pouring down my back, that's how stressed I am. … All of a sudden, anybody who thought it was a good idea maybe tweeted once, and everybody who thought it was a bad idea tweeted it repeatedly, wrote articles, and had nasty things to say. [There was a woman who] said I was unfit for the role because she had read an article from the financial crisis, in which an unnamed source said I had lost my temper, and therefore, this woman deemed me to be unfit. And I'm like: Wait a minute! There was so much wrong with this, right? An unnamed source? And don't you want somebody who loses their temper during a financial crisis?!

Anyway, after that I thought, you know what? I could make it without having to go through this. It’s nasty. This is nasty.
 
What’s your biggest piece of advice to other women?
There's just too many women who are working for men who simply aren't going to promote them. And there's an entire industry of female-in-business self-help books that tell us it’s our fault if we’re not being promoted: We didn't approach the performance review in the right way, or we weren't forceful enough. Sometimes we have to admit, much more quickly that we have, that it’s not me—it’s him.
 
What's the biggest change for women in business you've seen since starting your career?
Well, it’s not how many more who are in senior roles, is it? It hasn't been nearly the change I would have guessed. The big change has been that even just a few years ago, if a woman spoke out against inequities in the workplace, everybody else--we all looked away, because we were socialized to do so. [We thought] we should play within the existing construct, as opposed to changing the construct. And I think the big, big change over the past year is that we've said we just don't have to play in that old construct again, and that women have raised each other up and believed each other. Which is pretty damned significant.
 

Lady Bits

 
--“‘[Jane the Virgin creator] Jennie [Snyder Urman] did a good job at hiring non-assholes.’ If Jane the Virgin is a show about the radical premise that good people can also be interesting, Urman may be a case study in the unusual idea that powerful, creative people can also be parents, caring colleagues, and empathetic leaders.” Meanwhile, “[The Good Place creator Michael] Schur is famous in the industry for his policy of--as he puts it in polite company--‘no jerks.’ This applies to every level of every project, from writers to directors to actors, and people say it is life-changing.” Two magazine features on two of my favorite television shows find some commonalities in the people creating and running them.
 
--“It turns out the problem with feminism all along was that it wasn’t men doing it!” Though if television about jerks--or meta-commentaries on same--is more your thing, BoJack Horseman’s episode about disgraced men on apology tours, antihero prestige TV, and the women criticizing/forgiving/enabling all of the above is pretty sharp!
 
--I got a flu shot at work yesterday, an otherwise-unremarkable annual event that will probably always remind me of the flu shots that my company gave out in funereal silence on November 9, 2016. Unrelated to that or to any recent developments on the Supreme Court, may I present my favorite line from last week’s The Good Place:
 

 
--Lady Business will be off next week, for the Inc. 5000 conference in San Antonio. We’ll be back on October 25!
 
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