Abigail Johnson

"Sometimes, all it takes is one person to believe in you"

"Having the confidence to revisit what I’d written and spend time in the moment helped me to tell a better story. Sometimes it’s the smallest details that bring a character to life"

"I can honestly say that rejections have made me a better writer. I tried to take on board any feedback I was lucky enough to receive, was spurred on to find out as much as I could about the industry, and I learned to bounce back when disappointments arose. Because of these experiences, I fully appreciate how far I have come, and I think this will help me to face the inevitable ups and downs that come with being an author"

"My father was interested in technology and impressed upon me how important it was to business"

"HBS was more important preparation for the role that I’m in now than I possibly could have appreciated at the time"

"I got the stock-picking bug,she says. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge, and I liked interacting with the fund managers"

"We are in the midst of a major transition that takes advantage of technology to deliver better service"

"You have to be a worrier. Every business has risks, and companies that feel comfortable are probably not paying enough attention"

"No matter how senior you get in an organization, no matter how well you’re perceived to be doing, your job is never done"

"Every day you get up and the world is changing, your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there"

"Every day you have to get up with new energy and new ideas to contribute to pushing the organization forward"

"lots of people will give you advice…and depending upon how well they know you, the advice might be valid or not so valid"

"At the end of the day,” she says, you know yourself best"

"I had to learn to communicate to very different types of groups of managers with different orientations, different priorities,she says. And that was a real leadership challenge"

"I was responsible for filling out the forms to correctly put in order the transactions that they were requesting"

"It was a pretty basic job. But it gave me an appreciation of what it was like to be responsible for really important things in people’s lives and making sure that they were always done accurately and correctly"

"I demand pretty aggressive goal setting and a commitment to measured progress towards those goals because I don’t like surprises"

"I can only aspire to be as creative as [my father has] been in his career,” she says. “But that was always an influence on me: Don’t assume that the answers are out there in the form of somebody else already doing something. Sometimes they are. But you have to think beyond that. You have to think that the answer and the right answer for you and your organization might not be something that’s been done before. And it’s up to you to discover and work with your team to form and figure out how to do successfully"

"There are a lot of great reasons why anybody—but particularly women—should consider doing something like being an analyst"

"It’s a very independent kind of a job where you set your own direction on a day-to-day basis. You have a lot of demands and a lot of deliverables, but you actually have a lot of control over planning your time. You obviously have to be responsible and deliver your results, but there are a lot of different ways that you can do that"

"Based on everybody’s contributions about what they see changing, what can we try that would be something new and different"

"Some of them are good ideas, but at the wrong time, and we just move on to the next one. And some of them have to be reworked multiple times"

"I think a liberal arts education is actually a great background for our industry. I feel that really strongly"

"What’s important to us is that people who come to us with liberal arts backgrounds are dedicated students and want to learn. So if we put something in front of you, you’re going to learn it. You’re going to study it. You’re going to think, you’re going to ask questions, and you’re going to understand how to communicate well, because that’s a lot of what you learn from your liberal arts education"

"That sense of accountability is really, really critical"

"thinking and working across the organization is really important—trying to take the perspective of other groups around the company"

"taking smart risks and practicing pace over perfection"

"Keep moving, don’t get hung up on being a perfectionist"