Sallie Krawcheck
Follow the money at all costs, and you might wind up regretting it.
Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.
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?
One thing I never thought about in my big-company job? Cash flow. When your business has billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and you can find yourself in real jeopardy fast.
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.
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.
Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.
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.
I read research like other people read sports magazines or fashion magazines.
Greater diversity drives better business results.Collection: Diversity
Networking is the No. 1 unwritten rule of success in business.Collection: Business Success
If it comes down to your ethics vs. a job, choose ethics. You can always find another job.Collection: Jobs
As we work together and pool our resources, there's room for everyone to be successful.Collection: Successful
If you haven't had a major fail in your career - face-plant level - you aren't trying hard enough.Collection: Careers
I love what's going on these days with these powerful women who are really working to make a difference.Collection: Powerful
If you're not making some notable mistakes along the way, you're certainly not taking enough business and career chances.Collection: Inspiring
I prefer the word "engagement." Instead of empowerment, it's enabling women to engage in business.Collection: Empowerment
If a woman is making $85,000 a year, putting aside 20% of her income, putting it in a bank, earning very little...Over the course of her life vs. investing, this can cost her $1.5 million, $2 million, $2.5 million. Life changing amounts.Collection: Life Changing
There is absolutely nothing that beats hard work.Collection: Hard Work
Nothing bad happens when women are in positions of power.Collection: Position Of Power
I'm really putting my life towards helping women to invest, and there's a circular reference here because if women can invest and give themselves the opportunity to earn higher returns, they can start those businesses. They can go to work with a little more confidence to ask for that promotion, to ask for the new assignment, etc.Collection: Opportunity
Technology is going to play an increasingly, increasingly, increasingly important role in every industry. And it's good.Collection: Technology
I would say one of the reasons that women don't invest to the same extent that men do, is because we still think of it in some ways as a male pursuit.Collection: Men
If a woman was successful, she wasn't helping other women.Collection: Successful
I think that indicates why men tend to invest more wealth. If he loses some, there's more coming in. Whereas for women, it's like "Ugh, I gotta keep this."Collection: Men
Facts are that the financial advisers on Wall Street today or anywhere depending on which firm, what point in time - 85 to 88 percent male, and that is part of why investing for women they tell us feels unapproachable because they don't see people who look like them.Collection: Wall
Women, girls and young ladies tend to be as good or better at math than boys, but you didn't think that either.Collection: Girl
When you speak to a man or a woman about money, they will use water visualizations. For men, it typically is a river. Money comes in; money goes out. The level rises; the level sinks. For women, when you talk about money, to her... it's a pond. It's a set amount. She husbands it, and it typically goes in one direction... which is down.Collection: Husband
Women tend to live longer than men do. Women tend to have, unfortunately, their salaries peaked sooner than men's do. Both of these things are extraordinarily important in putting together financial and investing plans for women.Collection: Men
Women tend to have a better track record in investing - when they invest - than men do, because they tend to take a longer-term perspective. They tend to trade less. They tend to shift in and out of stocks or mutual funds less often.Collection: Men
Women tend to collaborate, in my experience, more easily than gentlemen do.Collection: Gentleman
Emerging investors want to invest differently. They want to have their dollars - their investment dollars - do double duty.Collection: Dollars
Women tend to very much, very much think of money as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.Collection: Mean
Women tell us that they do feel patronized. They do feel like they don't have the time and the space to have their questions answered.Collection: Space
Something happens in the middle when women are in their 30s, and we can start with an array of things that happen, whether it is - you hope this doesn't exist any longer - but overt discrimination; whether it's subtle gender discrimination, which absolutely does exist among men and women; whether it's the fact that it gets hard to juggle at that point children, housework, etc. But people still have to go home and cook the dinner and clean the dishes and get the beds made and so on. And so, for a whole bunch of reasons, women tend to fall out in their 30s still today.Collection: Children
I can tell you that my experience has been that the gentlemen are more likely to come and ask for the order, ask for the raise, ask for the promotion, and that the women are less likely to do so.Collection: Order
The truth is, if you are a woman saving 10% of your income for retirement, and you put it in the bank account, your chances of retiring well - living on 90% of your pre-retirement income for your full life - is 0%.Collection: Retirement
I had very good bosses, very good companies for which I worked. I worked in industries where the results really mattered; it wasn't the perception of results, it was just the facts.Collection: Boss
You have six math Ph.D. Caucasian gentlemen from the Northeast of the country, great. You put one more in the mix, you haven't added much. It's only when you add something different that you really are able to accomplish more.Collection: Country
A computer can have so much more in its brain that a human can.Collection: Brain
Your adrenaline starts to go when the market opens in the morning. It's like sports programming.Collection: Sports
I was lucky. My children didn't have health issues, didn't have big school problems, etc. And as I watched some of my peers go through this, you can see how quickly a family can get derailed when they are not lucky.Collection: Children
If a woman waits 10 years to invest, "I'm busy", "I've got to do this", "I can put it off", "I gotta find the right financial..." It costs her $100 a day. $100 a day! And if we had money falling out of her pocketbook at the rate of $100 a day, we'd change our pocketbook; we'd fix our pocketbook.Collection: Fall
Women have different characteristics and needs than men do.Collection: Men
The industry financial advisers, on average about 85% male, tends to be a more mature financial adviser - so I think in their 50s, really. For so many companies, in their 60s. In fact, there is one company that was telling me they had more financial advisers over the age of 80 than under the age of 30.Collection: Thinking
In our corporate culture, because someone may have to take some flexibility because of family issues, somehow we continue to believe they aren't fully dedicated.Collection: Believe
How about mandated parental leave.? Oh, okay. Less than 20% of companies in America have it. Most of them think about it as an expense. What's the bigger expense? The bigger expense occurs if women have babies and don't come back to work.Collection: Baby
When I started on Wall Street, there was pretty good diversity in those junior ranks. And you know what? It hasn't made it to the top.Collection: Wall
Companies that put a mandated parental leave in place save money in the first year, FIRST YEAR. Because they don't have to hire to replace the woman.Collection: Years