Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski Read Free Book Online

powerful woman, who didn’t know her “face” value, even as she reached the top of the ladder.

    “I was just happy to have the professional position.”
    —CAROL BARTZ

    My experience with the CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz, was also an eye-opener. To borrow the famous line from the movie When Harry Met Sally , “I’ll have what she’s having!”
    Bartz is a rarity in today’s corporate world: she’s among the select women heading three percent of Fortune 500 companies and one of only a handful heading a technology firm. When I ask her whether she has ever had trouble getting paid what she’s worth, her reply is immediate: “Oh, honest to god, I think every step of the way. There’s no question about that.”
    Bartz tells me that in the early 1990s, she was competing with two men to be CEO of Autodesk, a multinational design software company. She got the job and ended up with what she thought was a generous compensation package. But she later found out that the men she was up against had been asking for millions more. Says Bartz: “What they were negotiating for was way over— way over what they had negotiated with me ... you know, I was too naïve, too stupid, and they got me on the cheap ... when I found out what the guys were asking, I thought, ‘You dummy.’ ”

    Bartz says that early on in her career, she had difficulty promoting herself. “When I was younger, I was just happy to have the professional position,” she tells me. “Then I think you naïvely put your head in the sand, and think they will notice your worth.”
    I was struck by the fact that both Bartz and Sandberg were telling me stories about not knowing their value, and feeling lucky to get the offers they did. I had assumed their psychology would be different, and that they had handled themselves very differently. Hearing these women talk about luck struck a chord with me. My feeling lucky to have a job had cost me dearly over the years. Feeling lucky and fearing rejection. Women who run women’s magazines are extremely in tune with those sentiments that drive us or get in our way. On this issue, they let it rip.
    Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor-in-chief of More magazine, the leading lifestyle magazine for women of substance and style, is a great promoter of women. She is a wife and mom, and she is also a friend and mentor.
    She tells me, “If you talk to a lot of women as you’re doing this, you’re going to hear a lot of women use the word luck . I hear executives all the time say, ‘I’m lucky to have gotten here, I’m lucky’ ... I can’t even tell you how many successful females, CEOs of companies, will say ‘I just got lucky.’ But if you think it’s just luck that made you successful, then if you ask for too much, the luck might just run out.”
    “Emotion can trip women up,” Seymour says when she hears my story. “We are willing to take those substitutes because we have been brought up on emotion.” Seymour, who
has run several magazines in the thirty-some years she’s been in publishing, said it took her years to realize that feeling “loved” by her bosses did not mean she was being valued. “I definitely made the mistake in my career of looking for an emotional connection instead of just money. I used to tell my boss that I would do the job ‘even if you didn’t pay me,’ ” Seymour says, laughing. “I guess they decided to take me at my word.” She would later discover that colleagues with the same responsibilities had larger salaries.

    “We are willing to take those substitutes because we have been brought up on emotion.”
    —LESLEY JANE SEYMOUR

    “I ran each magazine basically with the idea I was going to run it as if it were my own product, my own business, with my own money . . . I’m going to make the best choices because I’m running it as if it’s mine, I’m putting in 120 hours a week, and I’m saving them money, they’re going to love me so much . . . And guess what. They didn’t