Know Your Value

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

A KNOW YOUR VALUE MOMENT, ALMOST MISSED

Know Your Value has become so much more than a book since its original release in 2011.

So many women got raises after reading this book. Countless women have stopped me on the street or at airports across the country to say these exact eight words: “I read your book. I got a raise!” And then they hug me. And while I am not usually a hugger of strangers, when I hear those words I hug back. Sometimes I tear up.

This book is more than a guide to negotiating your salary. I wrote it to teach women how to dig deep, find their own voices, and communicate their value effectively. The book is about getting your full value in every relationship: at work, at home, in life. I show women how apologizing and self-deprecating actually depreciates their value at the very moment they should be cashing in. This is as much a “what to do” book as it is a “what not to do” guide, with my mistakes as exhibits A, B, C, and D in full view—once again, warts and all. This book is about how to get more money, more recognition, more respect for your contributions… how to get your true value.

I’m proud of the women who have taken the advice in this book to heart, because I know it’s not just about the money; it is the Know Your Value process that has paid off in their paychecks… and their lives. I am so thrilled when I see that light in their eyes, that victorious posture, and that energy. They read the book and the advice I gathered here from so many strong, fascinating women. My readers put themselves out there, and they set their lives on a whole different path forward with endless possibilities that simply did not exist in their minds before.

The book has inspired a conference series, a multiplatform social media effort, and there are more books in the works. We have taken the Know Your Value message on the road to cities across the country and have helped thousands of women know and grow their value. We have brought aspirational and inspirational women together to have conversations about how we as women can get our worth in all areas of our lives.

THE INSPIRATION for the first edition of this book occurred on a beautiful spring day back in 2010. I was in the White House and dropped by presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett’s office to say hello. We started talking about work-life balance. We discussed the excitement and challenges of having so many opportunities as women. For Valerie, the challenges were raising an incredible daughter on her own, navigating the worlds of business and politics at the top level, and helping to propel the first African-American president into office. For me, they were raising two extraordinary girls while traveling the country and covering the Obama presidency. We marveled at all that was possible, but also commiserated about the cost of our choices. The sacrifice. The determination that meeting our challenges required. I had just written a memoir, and I mentioned that I had an idea for another book, but I didn’t think my schedule would allow me to write it. I could barely do any of my jobs well. I was wavering about whether I could handle the workload along with the three-hour morning show.

She asked what the concept was, and I described to her my theories about women and value. I explained how poorly I’d advocated for myself over the course of my career, and what I’d learned recently about how I could have earned so much more—not just more money, but more recognition for my contributions—and how I had talked to so many successful women who admitted to floundering the same way. I realized immediately that I’d hit a nerve. She said, “You have to write this book. This is important. This is the next part of the conversation. Even more, this book is in you. You have to write it. It’s so important.” Her eyes locked in, dead serious.

And then she proceeded to tell me about the White House Council on Women and Girls, and its efforts for National Equal Pay Day, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and all the studies they had underway. She told me the administration had people at every level dealing with women’s issues, whether it be access to capital or the gender wage gap. Valerie not only urged me to write the book, she said, “I’ll help you. What can I do? We’ve gotten really far. Women run the world. But we’re not getting our value.”

Valerie Jarrett was an inspiration to me and a catalyst for this project. What really was just a casual visit had taken a dramatic turn, and I walked out of her office knowing I was going to write this book. I realized that if my story spoke to Valerie, then it certainly would speak to others.

FAST FORWARD TO 2017: The world is a different place.

Soon after his inauguration, Donald Trump invited me and Joe Scarborough to Sunday lunch at the White House. I could see immediately how swept up he was in his new job. Instead of feeling the weight of responsibility that any sane leader would feel upon his shoulders, Trump was like a kid in a candy shop who was giddy with his new surroundings.

“He’s gone. What few guardrails he allowed to be put up during the campaign are completely gone now. He is about to get worse than ever,” Joe had observed after talking with him on inauguration night.

Before the White House lunch, Ivanka Trump and I discussed the importance of getting the new president to focus on the kind of women’s issues that I had worked on with Valerie Jarrett throughout the Obama administration. Because it was so difficult to get Donald Trump to focus on any topic that did not feed directly into his ego, Ivanka and I discussed strategies to break through Trump’s flurry of self-aggrandizing stories and fog of disinterest.

After lunch, I stood up to go look at the desserts as an excuse to interrupt his constant droning on about his election win, the record size of his inaugural crowd, and how great his first week in the White House had been. Of course, his first week was not great and the crowd at his inauguration a week earlier was far smaller than Barack Obama’s. The fact that Joe and I had already pointed out both of those facts to him probably did nothing to put our relationship back on positive footing, but I wasn’t done trying. As I got up and moved toward a side table, I turned around and said, “Donald, we need to talk about women’s issues.”

“What?” the president said.

“We need to talk about women’s issues.”

“Huh?”

“Women, Donald, women! You know…”

I then motioned with my arms an hourglass figure in the air to relate the topic to a man who clearly did not have a clue and did not care about the issues I had been discussing with Ivanka.

“Donald! I said WOMEN!” I felt dirty making the hourglass motion, but it was the only way to get this misogynist to understand the word. Ivanka leaned forward.

Trump responded by looking at Ivanka condescendingly. “Oh yeah, women. Yeah honey, yeah, we will get to that.” Just as quickly he moved on to talk about his travel ban. I glanced over at the president’s daughter, who looked deflated as the conversation veered off to extreme vetting. It was clear that the man who spent years running beauty pageants and talking about women mainly in the context of their physical features was never going to see females as anything more than sex objects to rate on Howard Stern’s show, or as the subject of locker room talk.

Not long after this lunch, the president of the United States would be attacking my looks via Twitter, accusing me of meeting with him while “bleeding badly from a facelift.” It was a ludicrous tweet. The social media universe rose up to defend me, but I wasn’t upset—until I remembered that Trump was quoted in the original Know Your Value, talking about how much he valued women!

Clearly it was time to revisit my book. Especially since my publisher was… Harvey Weinstein (you can’t make this stuff up). By the time I started writing this new edition, Harvey Weinstein had been revealed as an extraordinary abuser of women, and his downfall had sparked a worldwide movement. Women across the country—even across the globe—had had enough. The women’s movement has been invigorated in ways that will play out in many elections to come.

Women were raising their voices and demanding equal treatment, equal pay, and to be heard in cases of sexual harrassment and assault. The #MeToo movement has changed the way we talk about office politics and appropriate professional relationships. We are now talking about abuse of power and the struggles women go through on the national stage. Women have been literally taking to the streets, fighting to be heard.

Once you truly own your voice, it’s amazing how effective you can be with it.

While the rise of Donald Trump and the fall of Harvey Weinstein were catalysts for the re-release of this book, there were a number of other reasons I needed to revisit these pages. Professional and personal changes have given me new insight to share and inspired new questions to ask other women.

Morning Joe has become a fixture in the political landscape, the place where power players come to be a part of the national conversation. We are marking eleven years in 2018 with Joe, Willie Geist, and me as the longest-running anchor team on TV, and our ratings have never been better. We are reaching more people every single day, and that growth has taught me so much. These turbulent times have made it important for me to take everything we have written and update it, go deeper, and design it for today’s world.

On top of the professional successes of Morning Joe, my personal life—which has become increasingly more public in the last few years—has gone through dramatic changes that have given me new insight into my own worth. I have been divorced and I am getting remarried. And while it is extremely important to me that I be respectful of all parties in what I do and do not share, I have learned so much since first writing this book about what it means to know your value… in all areas of your life. I discovered the message truly applies to your personal brand as well as your professional one.

The original book was successful in part because it included stunningly candid conversations with successful women who were willing to be interviewed on what, for many, can be a very personal subject. We have influential women in government such as Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair, and Elizabeth Warren; personal-finance expert Suze Orman; media entrepreneurs Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown; and women’s magazine leaders like More magazine’s Lesley Jane Seymour and Cosmopolitan’s Kate White. I interviewed the unforgettable Nora Ephron, who passed away after the original publication, Joy Behar, and Susie Essman. I spoke to top researchers on the subject of gender and negotiation, such as Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles. For the male perspective, I asked the likes of Jack Welch, Phil Griffin, Joe Scarborough, and Donny Deutsch to weigh in. Some of the interviewees had been on the show; some, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, I thought should be on the show.

And now we’ve added some new voices we wanted to hear from and new research and statistics that are important to share. For this re-release, I brought fresh voices to the table such as former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and assistant to President Obama Melody Barnes, BBC World News presenter Katty Kay, and senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for the New York Times Susan Chira. Katty Kay has since broken through with The Confidence Code (her incredible book series) and joined forces with women at the BBC to expose pay inequality there. (Way to go, Katty!) And because I am proud of my network and the talented women who fill the airwaves, I spoke to Katy Tur, who anchors MSNBC Live and covered the Donald Trump campaign for the network as its campaign embedded reporter, political correspondent Kasie Hunt, and Your Business host JJ Ramberg. I also interviewed two of the women who were chosen as finalists in my national Know Your Value events, Jennifer Hotchkiss and Ashton Whitmoyer, because their stories resonated with me on both a deeply personal and professional level. I also spoke with former federal law enforcement officer and one of the top body language experts in the world, Janine Driver, who knocked our socks off at the last KYV event in New York City. She will make you look at your “looks” in a whole new way. I spoke with Joe Scarborough and re-interviewed Phil Griffin. We added reproductive psychiatrist Dr. Catherine Birndorf, Executive Director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Victoria Budson, Executive Coach Liz Bentley, and SVP and CHRO at Independence Blue Cross Jeanie Heffernan.

The women I interviewed manage multibillion-dollar companies, run our government, and oversee our economy. These are women who deal day to day with challenges of national importance, yet I was struck by how similar our psychology was as we shared our experiences in the workplace. I assumed that such successful women must somehow have been smarter about their careers and their money. They must have taken a different road—we couldn’t possibly have made similar mistakes. But as I began sharing my struggles with women in a variety of fields, many of them told me of their own troubled efforts to get a raise, earn a promotion, or just to have their ideas heard in the conference room. Why are things that seem to be simple for many men so difficult for many women? Why do we undermine ourselves, often right from the start? How have they managed to be compensated for their true value? What have they done wrong, and what have they done right? How do they balance their personal and professional lives to achieve their true value?

There are lessons to be learned from my experience with President Trump and his ridiculous tweets, the Harvey Weinstein mess, and from the experiences of a number of far more successful women I spoke with when writing this book.

And all the questions are answered when a woman knows her value.

For the women who I turn to in this book, about how they did it, their answers were surprisingly honest and unexpectedly revealing. Apparently none of them played the game exactly the way the men did. Among other things, they taught me some important lessons about getting out of my own way, learning to speak up, negotiating from a place of power instead of fear, owning my success, and perhaps most important, getting the compensation I deserve.

After all, there’s money to be made in these lessons. And the lessons apply to everything in life. Money, in this book, is simply a metaphor. This is about being valued in the way you should be—at work or anywhere. Every lesson that you will read about in this book can apply to relationships, raising children, marriage, being in a profession, being in an industry, changing jobs… everything. Because if you don’t demand what you’re worth and you don’t communicate it well, you won’t be treated fairly, and the relationship will ultimately die.

And if you don’t ask for what you deserve, you won’t ever find out what you’re made of, and what you truly can do. You undermine yourself by not developing your tools and learning what to do with them (and what not to do with them); how to use your voice, your brain, your words, your style, your approach, your finesse—everything in your power to get your value.

The issue of equal pay, the gender wage gap, knowing your value—these are perennially important issues that affect women everywhere. And in an age where women feel they have taken a massive step back every time they turn on the news and hear their president speak, equal pay is an issue that’s more timely than ever, and truly affects everyone.

There are a variety of reasons for gender inequality in the workplace. Many of them are complicated, and some are not completely understood. But in sharing these cautionary tales and personal victories, research, and anecdotal evidence, I hope women will learn something that helps them chart their own course. I don’t claim that we will eliminate the gender wage gap—not even close. But we can strategize and do much better for ourselves, and for the next generation. We are going to talk about your value to your company, your value to your family, and the cultural climate that surrounds these issues. What I’ve learned from the women I’ve interviewed will stay with me. I want to share their wisdom with my daughters, and in this book I will share their wisdom with you.