The Missouri native shares some insights from a sizzling 30+ year career in the take-no-prisoners world of investment banking, and explains why she's hot for Latin America.
Q. What is the basis of your deep interest in the Latin American region?
A : I spent a great deal of my childhood in Texas, and I went to Mexico many
times, so I’ve always been interested in the culture—It’s fantastic.
Then when I was (an investment banker) at Citibank, as well as CFO of the Latin
American Corporate Bank from 1986 to 1990, I was intimately involved in restructuring
Latin American loans during the debt crisis, which instilled a financial interest
in me.
Q. You have called Latin America “the region of the 2000s.” Why?
A : I’m talking about a specific subset of the region: Mexico, Brazil,
Peru, Chile, and Colombia. These are five fantastic economies with very stable,
creative governments, very low inflation, a burgeoning middle-class, developing
capital markets, and terrific enthusiasm and energy.
Q. Latin American stock and bond markets
have been going great-guns for years. What’s your outlook?
A : These stock markets have been among the strongest in the world for three
to five years. For the last three years, Brazil is up over 100%, Chile over 100%,
and Mexico almost 200%.
Q. Good for ’07 as well?
A : I think these are very attractive longer-term
capital markets.
Q. What’s the biggest misconception Americans have of the region?
A : It’s hard for them to understand the extraordinary creativity and cultures,
the deep work ethic, and the relative ease of doing business in these emerging markets compared
with others. But I know hundreds of people who have been to Europe and never
been to Mexico, and it’s easy to have misconceptions about a place you’ve
never been.
Q. To what do you attribute your tremendous success in investment banking?
A : To being very disciplined and pretty intuitive.
Q. Where do you get your sense of discipline?
A : Definitely family. When we were very young, it was made very clear to me
that when I got out of college I was either going to work or not eat very much.
Q. What’s the most challenging part of your job?
A : It’s a deeply personal business. I’m working with chairmen of
companies, and when they want to talk, they want to talk to you—and
maybe three of them want to talk to you at the same time. You have to really
understand how to manage multiple important activities at the same time in a
persistent, but calm way.
Q. How would you describe your management style?
A : Very fair and open. There is nothing I won’t do to help my team. My
job is to make their jobs easier, but I won’t do their jobs for them.
Q. Is there a particular emotional makeup that’s ideal for success in your
field?
A : I think you have to be reasonably quantitative, disciplined, and energetic,
and I believe intuition helps a lot. But I think you also have to be a little
paranoid, especially in doing mergers and acquisitions, which is often an optional
business. It’s sometimes easy to walk away from a merger thinking you’re
finished, so you have to anticipate that things might go wrong and fix them before
they do.
Q. Are there rules of success that govern your career?
A : You can never get through
a negotiation just representing your client. You have to be fair and consider
the other side’s position;
why it works for them.
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