Darian Ward and Magen Pastor enjoy the launch.
Photo by Rovo
"I always say who you know is what you know. I
got to the Ellevate network by sitting next to Arthur
Levitt it on an airplane. (The former chairman of the
SEC) who introduced me. I had a line of
introductions that was nine people long. One was an
entrepreneur who introduced me to a venture
capitalist - Nine people later I met the woman who
owned at the time 85 Broads - today the Ellevate
network. And so this idea of coming together and
sharing information-- the pie can grow. It's not if I tell
you something then it's subtracts from me. It can
actually help all of us grow in my thinking."
What do you think it's going to take to put mor e
women in cor porate leader ship positions?
"I think the first thing is it needs to have the
support of the Chief Executive Officer. Without the
support of the man or woman at the top you might as
well just forget it. We survey our women and what
we found is you could have it as a corporate mission
but if you don't have someone sitting there actively
thinking about it all the time our gender biases take
over. I'll give you a real example of my gender bias.
So, a handful of years ago when I was running
Smith Barney we were doing our promotions and
there was a young man that came up to be promoted
and what was said about him is 'Oh my gosh -he's
aggressive. He'll break some eggs. He gets it done.
He's beat plan.' And we said great and he was
promoted.'"
"The next one up was a woman. 'You know she
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(L-R) Bloomberg Houston Bureau Chief Richard Stubbe, Sallie Krawcheck,
Alex Dell and Money Matters Host Chris Hensley; Photo by Rovo
beat plan. The market's really good this year -- but
she does in a way that's aggressive and she'll break an
egg.' We advised her to get an executive coach in
order to make her more effective. Right? And I didn't
catch it, because the word aggressive with a man is a
positive and with a woman can be a negative and
they can be exactly the same. It was actually several
people later that one of the gentleman in the room
said do we realize what we just did? We attributed his
success to him and her success to the market. And we
reversed course and promoted them both. That was
me, and my head of HR by the way was a woman. So
we both had gender biases. But what I fret about so
much in this country is that Sheryl Sandberg's Lean
in - if taken to an extreme - means we should all act
like that. And the power of diversity is diversity and
we also need to make sure that we are training our
managers - not trying change our women - but
change our managers too and that has to come from
The CEO."
Why do you feel it's good business to invest in
companies with women in leader ship positions?
"Because the research shows they drive good
results, and again it's not women are great and men
aren't. It's diversity is great. When you have a team
that is all of the same it's not aggregate, right? The
analogy that I use is a bunch of UNC basketball
players from the past come together and the five best
players in a group of 20 are Kendall Marshall and
Jimmy Black and Marcus Page and Phil Ford and