Sallie Krawcheck

I've managed many people in my career. I've managed very diverse teams. And it's interesting because what I've found over time is that when it would come to bonus time or raise time, I would hear from the gentlemen, 'I want to make X.' I don't think I ever heard from a woman who worked for me, 'I want to make X.'

I have a very simple point of view, which is, I'm going to be alive for some amount of time; I don't know how long that's going to be. Then I'm going to be dead for a really, really long time. Right? You need to squeeze everything you can out of this time when you're alive.

The 'aha' moment came one to me one morning when I was applying my mascara, and I realized that the retirement crisis is actually a woman's crisis: Women live longer than men yet retire with less money.

To empower women, power must be given to them, presumably by an entity that already has it. And that entity is the patriarchy. This also implies that women must be on the receiving end, waiting - politely - to be empowered. Very Victorian-era courtship, isn't it?

My low point was after being reorganized out of running Merrill Lynch. That dismissal deeply contradicted my sense of fairness, since, at the time, my team and I had done what we were brought in to do: We had turned Merrill Lynch around from the depths of the financial crisis.

I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.

If you are going to fire this person or hire that person, do it all in a concentrated period. The Band-Aid gets ripped off, and everybody goes back to work.

Women bring some great qualities to work. We bring risk-awareness. We bring a greater focus on relationships. We bring more holistic decision-making than gentlemen do. We bring a more long-term perspective than gentlemen do. We tend to look for meaning and purpose in our jobs to a greater degree than gentlemen do.

Stop hoping for a promotion that's not coming. Instead, start a business at which you want to work.

There are a lot of things in business that are completely out of your control, but hard work isn't one of them.

I'm a Weeble. Remember Weebles? The toy whose tagline was, 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down?' I'm resilient. Oh, and I work really hard.

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.