Alice Hackett, Chief Revenue Officer for a Wall Street fintech talks about how providing value and helping others have been her blueprint for mentorship and business success.
Alice Hackett, or Ali as she likes to be called, asks two things of the people she mentors — exercise at least once a week and find ways to help others. Ali has spent her career in the world of high finance — building businesses in volatile markets, leading teams and bringing people along. She is currently serving as the Chief Revenue Officer at LiquidX, a technology solution for trade finance and working capital assets. Ali’s resume includes some of the world’s largest financial services companies and banks, but her roots are humble. And it is those roots that have never let her forget her responsibility to others.
Supportive early networks
Ali describes her childhood, which helped shape her business ethos.
“I am one of eight children, my parents were immigrants (my mother is Japanese and my father is Irish) and we lived in a two-room house – the boys slept on one bed, the girls on another and my parents slept in the dining room. We always knew we had to work, that nothing was going to be handed to us. We grew up at a time when simple things that we take for granted today just weren’t possible. My twin sister got burned in a fire in our house, and she recovered alone in the hospital. We weren’t even allowed to visit her. The world has gotten so much better in ways that we don’t even think about because we are so focused on the bad. But we need to remember how far we have come.”
Ali and her siblings knew, early on that they had to carve their own paths.
“Our family’s story is a coming to America story — a home that was rich in love with parents who worked hard and dreamt of a better future for their children. It was something that we all understood. We had a lot of love in our home and I am lucky because my family is a built-in supportive network I’ll always have.”
Ali’s principles of mentorship
“I learned the value of mentorship and sponsorship as I was coming up on Wall Street. I’ve mentored a lot of people and most of them have been women and people of color. Everyone can benefit from mentorship but in the eighties and nineties, that was a cohort of people that needed sponsorship most. They still do.”
Ali has a few principles that she applies to her own career and to the people she mentors.
Advocate your wins, humbly
“I used to tell my children to never brag. I suppose that’s the Asian in me speaking. But now I wonder if I did them a disservice because, it’s necessary to celebrate your wins. I tell my mentees to keep a diary of their achievements and learnings. We live in such a fast-paced world, no one else is paying attention to your successes, so you need to advocate for yourself. In my experience, women struggle with this, probably because of our conditioning. But that’s why it is more important that we get comfortable with advocating for ourselves. You have to do it on Wall Street, and you have to do it everywhere else.”
We have to get comfortable advocating for ourselves. You have to do it on Wall Street and you have to do it everywhere else.
Be willing to be uncomfortable in your career
P.T. Barnum called comfort the enemy of progress, and no one understands this better than Ali, who was a young upstart on Wall Street at a time when the market was booming. The atmosphere was male dominated but all around, women were succeeding in the financial markets and so taking professional risks was table stakes.
“In the 1980s, futures, derivatives and listed derivatives were new concepts. I had just landed on Wall Street in an administrative position and moved up quickly. Equities was an old boys club, but futures was an even playing field. A new frontier in finance. No one really knew how they worked and so I decided to take a risk and learn the business. It was a great career move for me because it created opportunities I couldn’t have foreseen at the time,” Ali tells me.
“I tell my mentees that if a new opportunity presents itself, take it and if it makes you a little uncomfortable, that’s a good sign. We need to be open to some risk, because the payoff is something you may not even see yet. I’ve always been open to trying new things in my career. It’s okay if I have never done it before, I can learn it.”
Learning is cumulative
“Learning is cumulative, and it is yours. People can take away your job, your titles, even your money, but no one can take away your learning. Before I worked in big data tech, I had worked at Citigroup, an exchange, and a clearing house. All these jobs added to my repository of knowledge for what I do today in fintech. I didn’t know fintech or have a background in it. The work I do now involves corporate banking, big data, block chain and many other concepts. These are all new concepts, but I’ve never let new scare me because it is an opportunity to learn. The learning will stay with me no matter where I go.
I believe that it’s important to embrace your career based on learning. It’s like math – if you can get the hang of arithmetic, you can do algebra. And if you can do algebra, you can do geometry. You keep stacking skills until you have a storehouse of knowledge that goes with you everywhere.”
Learning is cumulative, and it’s yours. People can take away your job, your titles, even your money. But no one can take away your learning.
Be brave
“In 1998, I was working for Citigroup when we went through a massive merger with Salomon Smith Barney, one of the largest mergers in banking in history. I had been a salesperson my entire career and I was working under a boss who divided people all the time. He asked me to manage a team and take on a new role during this merger, which was a very volatile time for Citigroup. It was a big risk, my husband’s company had gone under, and I had three kids. It wasn’t a time to take risks. But I had sponsors in my corner, and I didn’t want to be professionally stuck, so I took the job. My first day in the new role, my sponsors were fired. Here I was, first day on the job, no parachute, an uncollaborative boss, and I was the sole person supporting my family. But I stuck it out and fast-track a couple of years, I was running the business. The entire time I was going through it, I kept reminding myself to just be brave. And I’ve learned that if you can keep your cool, when everyone else around you is losing theirs, you come out ahead.”
Give, Give, Get
“I have always believed that the more you give in this life, the more you get out of it. And that goes for your career and business. I ask two things of the women I mentor. The first is that you exercise one day a week. It is so important for women to exercise, take care of themselves and meet their own needs before they can help anyone else.”
“The second is that you need to look outside of yourself and find time to give back. I want to hear about what you’re doing to help someone else. You don’t need to look far to help people. There could be someone on your team that you can help craft better emails. Putting your hand up to help your boss will always be appreciated. Helping people is easy because everyone needs it. There were times in my career that I took on two jobs and extra work outside of them, simply because someone needed help and no one else was willing to do it.”
I ask Ali if selflessness is rewarded in business. Her response — “I have a selfish motive for why I help people. It makes me feel good about myself.”
In her two decades on Wall Street, Ali has seen major shifts in business culture. “There is a lot more room for self-expression and individuality today. There was none when I was coming up in my career,” Ali says. But the one thing that has never changed for Ali is the concept of give, give get.
“Business is transactional and almost everyone approaches it in a transactional manner. But business is ultimately, at its core, about human relationships. And relationships succeed when you approach them from a mindset of giving without the expectation of anything in return.”
As I meditate on Ali’s perspective, I reflect on the business culture we live in. A culture where we want guarantees that our efforts will be reciprocated. That if we are offering up repeated value, we expect to see returns and quick ones at that. This line of thinking is antithetical to the nature of giving without expectation. In a world where everyone gives to receive, and is frustrated when they don’t, it is people like Ali who give and give, but eventually, get so much more.
