Career Curveballs: Doing the Job When No One Thinks You Can

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share how they turned setbacks into success. Read all their stories here.

I often joke that I was offered the position of Director of Research of Sanford Bernstein after all of the other analysts said no to the job. This, however, is not strictly true: I was offered the position after my mentor said no to the job – again and again and again.

He was one of Bernstein’s top analysts. He was the guy who had hired me (even though I was a stay-at-home-mom-with-an-infant), who had critiqued my research and who had fought for my first and second promotions. He introduced me to his clients and gave me pointers on my presentation skills. We were in and out of each others’ offices at least 20 times a day. He took years off of my career trajectory, and I am enormously grateful to him.

So I accepted the job he had turned down. And so he quickly quit and went to work at a competitor. And not quietly either.

It was a public nightmare vote of no-confidence. I will never forget the first research meeting after he left and the humiliation I felt. My boss took me aside to ask me if I still felt able to do the job. The real answer, of course, was no; the answer I gave was yes, but I remember as I was saying it, my intestines felt like they were falling into my feet.

But there was an odd freedom that (eventually) came from starting the race so far behind the starting line. Given that we had only about 20 analysts and my mentor had been one of our best, he was responsible for a healthy double-digit percent share of our revenues. Thus business-as-usual was not feasible. I was forced to think more seriously about our business. For example, was it true that our business was optimized (as we had always claimed) at a small number of great analysts? Or could I find and train 30 analysts? Or 40? Or 60? At what point did our research quality begin to slip and negatively impact us?

And was remaining in the stock underwriting business, alongside the research business, the right play? The other Wall Street firms pursued this strategy of serving two different sets of clients, with its inherent conflicts, but was there a different way? Could research only, and a sole focus on investing clients, be a better business model for us? Could we afford to give up underwriting’s “easy money”?

After much internal debate, we decided to narrow our focus to our investing clients only and to grow our number of analysts as quickly as I could find qualified individuals and train them. We bet that the in-depth, value-based research we produced would come back in vogue; we placed this bet despite clients’ feedback that they much preferred access to IPOs to research at the time.

After some bumps along the way, these moves paid off for us big-time when New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer’s investigations revealed that our competitors’ research analysts had been publicly bullish, but privately disparaging, of the stocks of their underwriting clients. The industry entered into a $1.4 billion enforcement agreement (back when $1.4 billion was a shocking number) and agreed to change how they managed their research departments, to insulate analysts from conflicts. Thus our business strategy was publicly validated. Months later, Sandy Weill brought me into Citigroup to turn around its scandal-scarred research operation and to run its Smith Barney business as well.

I really don’t know what strategy we would have pursued at Bernstein if my mentor had stayed. But I do know that it is hard to conceive of and effect significant strategic change when a business is operating well. I would have felt much more constrained, certainly seeking his counsel and most likely seeking his approval. There was a freedom in being forced to stand on my own two feet, even if it involved getting knocked off of them first.

Sallie Krawcheck is the Business Leader of the professional women’s network, 85 Broads. The network is 35,000+ women strong, with members from across industries and around the world.

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Photo: Public Domain