“As an executive, you have two resources: your name or reputation and your remaining years of productivity – which is a diminishing asset. Women squander both.”
– Pearl Meyer, the veteran executive-compensation consultant, told me this over lunch Friday. Women, she noted, tend to be lousy negotiators of both pay and title. I told her I agree, though many women are this way, I said, because we tend to care less than men about rank and size and vertical power. Meyer herself flubbed big-time back in 2000 when she sold her company. On the day she signed the papers to sell the business she started in 1989, Meyer was shocked to learn that her name was part of the sale. Now she’s senior managing director of Steven Hall Partners and competes with Pearl Meyer & Partners, the firm that bears her name.
