Episode Transcript

Mo Lidsky  00:06

I'd like to introduce our very special guest today, the extraordinary Eileen Murray. Eileen Murray is the chair of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, better known as FINRA, where she has served on the Board of Governors since 2016. Eileen is the former Co-Chief Executive Officer of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund with $138 billion of assets under management having taken the Chief Executive reins from Bridgewater's founder, Ray Dalio. Prior to joining Bridgewater, Eileen held several senior executive roles at Morgan Stanley as the Global Head of Technology and Operations, where she oversaw more than 10,000 employees and an annual budget of $5.5 billion. She subsequently served in a similar role for Credit Suisse, where she oversaw more than 7,000 employees and an annual budget of $4 billion and was the first woman to serve on the bank's executive board. In addition to Eileen's extraordinary career, she serves on various corporate and charitable boards, including HSBC, The Guardian Life Insurance, Compass, The Irish Art Center, among many others. Eileen has received more awards for her leadership and her philanthropic efforts than we have time to enumerate, but just a couple include the Lifetime Achievement Award for Markets Media, Hedge Fund Journal's 50 Leading Women in the Hedge Fund Industry, US Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking, Irish Magazine's 100 Best and Brightest Leaders, and the list goes on and on. To hear more from Eileen, then about Eileen, ladies, and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome our distinguished guest and industry legend, Mrs. Eileen Murray. Eileen, thank you so much for joining us.

Eileen Murray  02:01

Thank you, Mo. Let me also join you in thanking the sponsors for this incredibly important cause and thank you for doing this.

Mo Lidsky  02:11

Absolutely, absolutely. Let's dive right in. You had an interesting path to Wall Street. Maybe we could start off by you sharing a little bit about your journey and how you ended up at Morgan Stanley?

Eileen Murray  02:27

I went to Morgan Stanley pretty early in my career. I grew up in a housing project in the top of Manhattan and I was fortunate that, you know, I basically grew up with people from all walks of life. People of all different colors, you know, gender, and so forth. I went to a college, Manhattan College, which is a college for children of immigrants, which has changed its face over time. When I went there, I was encouraged to go into accounting by people. Whereas a number of other people were saying, "geez, accounting is not really for women". So, I actually went to, at the time, Peat Marwick one of your big sponsors, KPMG now. I was in the accounting group there and when I left after four years, I was the most experienced person, this is almost laughable, in the securities industry at the non-partner level. So, I went over to Morgan Stanley, and it was before they were public. Quite candidly, the reason I went there was I could go and work for triple the money for probably half the hours, which is not a good reason why I initially went there. Ultimately, having gone there, it was a fantastic experience. That pretty much was my first 26 years of my life.

Mo Lidsky  03:59

Let me actually go back to the first part of those 26 years because it sounds like you grew up in a fairly humble environment. What was unique about your upbringing, other than that it was a humble environment, that contributed to you becoming the person you are today?

Eileen Murray  04:20

I think there's something to be said that's pretty truthful about "you learn everything you know, in the first 5 or 10 years", I forget how many years they give you. But I was very fortunate to have two really great people for parents whom I love but I actually would like as people, and they gave us two really terrific gifts. One was love of family and two was raising us an environment, and they themselves being colorblind, religious blind. I have, you know, five brothers and three sisters, and trust me, there was no difference between who did the chores. Then when you grew up in a housing project, you know, people will tell me, you know, I remember I was at a robin hood get together and someone said to me, "you know, I saw the diamond three housing projects up, but we're collecting money for them". They said, "can you imagine growing up in that place?" So, I was like, "well, actually, yeah, I grew up there, I was pretty good." You couldn't buy a vacation, for where I grew up. I lived on the ninth floor of a 14-floor apartment building. There were people from four different countries, probably even more, Cuba, Italy, down the hall, the last case where people who were in a concentration camp, we had people from Puerto Rico, Estonia. You had all these people; you just didn't think about color and everybody kind of helped each other out.  What it gave me was an open mindedness and a blindness towards anything other than diversity of thought. When you have that kind of blindness, it's a great gift because, you're just listening to people for what they have to contribute. I didn't get to where I am in life, because of me, I got to where I am in life by getting other people, who have different ways of thinking, together, listening to them and really promoting them. That was a great gift my parents gave to us as kids and the neighborhood I grew up in. I can go to Greece, I could go to Africa, but where could I go and have all of that in one place? Different foods, different languages, different religions. I mean, it was beautiful. Now, there are other people who would see it very differently to me.  loved it and I think that teaches you to work hard. It's about hard work, not about who you are. Treat other people respectfully, and how you want to be treated. I know that sounds trite, but that's what I learned from my parents. I'm 63 years old now and those lessons were lessons that I don't really need to know much more because everything else in life that's technical, there's always someone that knows more, so you just have to talk to them.

Mo Lidsky  07:31

First of all, phenomenal experience, and learnings from the first 26 years, and particularly the earlier ones. Think about the next 26 years. All of the successes. You've had Bridgewater, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and so on. If you think about the aggregate of your professional experience, what do you think were some of the most instructive experiences that you had? And what might you wish you knew about the financial service industry before you reached the top of it?

Eileen Murray  08:04

Some of the aha moments for me in my career were, when I became controller at Morgan Stanley, and I really didn't think I should have the job. I grew up in the fixed income piece of Morgan Stanley. I was like, "gosh, I don't really know equities as well." I didn't understand that the reason I was picked for the job was because of how I was managing people, not necessarily what I knew technically. The first six months, I'm working, you know, 100, and something hours a week, trying to get everything done. After six months, my family said, "listen, you have a choice. It's us, or Morgan Stanley." I thought, well, I don't want to pick either one of those choices, so I better figure out a way to get my hours at Morgan Stanley down and I just realized, I don't need to know everything. I just started asking other people for help that I thought could help me on my journey. It was like this huge box of rocks was lifted off my back. It always astounds me how there are people in a room, even at my age today that feel the need to be the smartest person in the room. You never are. There's always someone that knows something more about something. That was a great learning experience for me.  The second big aha moment for me was when I worked on the swap desk. I'd say at the time, probably 30% of my staff were women, maybe 40%. Three of them went on maternity at the same time, so I let them all work from home. I get a phone call from HR. They say, "listen, people working from home is against our firm's policy." And I was like, "wow, I didn't even know we had a policy on that. We better change it because the works not otherwise." I was asked to talk to certain people on the Management Committee, and I was asked to put together the business case for diversity. Honestly, Mo I thought it was a joke. I was like, "okay, well, why don't you tell me the business case for homogeneity, expecting enough of rarish laughter." I look around the room and the joke were on me, he was laughing, they were dead serious. It was surprising to me that diversity would require a business case. It never dawned on me. It was a learning experience for me as I became more senior, that there were people who made distinctions, a lot of it unconscious, but some of the conscious on the basis of what people look like, what religion they might be, you know, what color they might be, what gender they might be. The rationale for it was to me illogical. Understanding that, you know, that that was that big distinction was another big aha moment for me. Then I learned that I could continue to use that as an opportunity to get more and more creative ideas.  In terms of what I wish I knew; I think that there were times in my career when I put work first and I probably shouldn't of. I sweated over things that I can't even remember now. Having someone to say, "hey, listen, this is not the end of the world". Having the perspective to put in perspective the things that I used to worry about. Having a little bit more wisdom earlier on or getting that from someone else probably would have been helpful. Other than that, honestly, to God, I feel so fortunate. I feel like God has been so good to me. Did I make mistakes in my career? If you have another couple of days, I could go through them with you, but I feel pretty lucky where I am and very blessed.

Mo Lidsky  11:17

We don't have a couple of days, but I'd love to know about the most instructive or enlightening ones. Obviously, there's no shortage of extraordinary achievements that make up who you are, but you didn't get to all those achievements without breaking an egg or two along the way. What were the most enlightening and valuable mistakes?

Eileen Murray  12:38

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was thinking that just because someone was senior to me, they knew more than me. It would have saved me a lot of time to have had more confidence or insight to understand that, you know, people, you know, feel vulnerable to say they don't know what they're talking about. I can think of several situations. I think the biggest mistakes I've made is really relying on people because of their title or because of where they might have been in a particular position that cost capital charges to certain firms, that cause a delay in getting certain employee policies put through. Work from home is a good example. You wanted to do work from home and someone more senior says, "well, it's a bad idea", and you think, "well, they must know what they're talking about." They really don't. Well, I shouldn't say it that way, but you know what I mean. It's understanding that there are people in life that don't feel comfortable saying "I don't know the answer to a particular question." I'm not being a wise guy, but I remember one mistake I made one that sticks out in my mind. Years and years ago, they used to have security accounts. There'd be these big fat packs of, you know, IBM securities. You had to count them and tick off on this computer paper that there were X number of them. The guy who was running the security account - I was the only woman, I had this beautiful white suit that I bought out at the time and went down into the basement of 120 Broadway. It was dusty, it was ridiculous. This guy's like "I can't believe we have a woman there". He made a lot of women jokes and, and I looked at him and I knew that he was not going to like what I said. I said, "you know, I really think you'd look much better in this skirt than I do, I bet you'd even like to wear it". Everyone laughed at him, and I felt so terrible that I made him feel so terrible. I became him. To me, I want to be who I am. I don't need to be somebody else. For some reason, that kind of stuff sticks in my head as a big mistake. Am I going to tell you that I blew something up or something? No, you know, I'm not a scientist, I didn't kill anybody. I'm not a doctor or a nurse. I've made mistakes on listening to people that I probably shouldn't have listened to, I should have researched more. Is the information they're giving me really reliable? That manifested itself in so many different ways, in terms of time delays, to get to better outcomes. I'm sorry, I don't have a great story for you.

Mo Lidsky  15:58

Over the course of your career, you've had this front row seat to many of the evolutions in the financial services world. What do you think have been some of the biggest changes from your point of view?

Eileen Murray  16:17

Globalization has been a huge change from 1980 to today. Most of what I'm saying has all been enabled by technology. I think globalization has been enabled by technology. Transparency has been huge on information and the speed of it. Customer and employee expectations have changed dramatically. We could go through the details of that in terms of fee structures, what clients expect, etc. The other big change has been, what I'll call, a lack of connectedness or contactlessness. What I mean by that, you know, used to go into a bank to, you know, take money out, you used to pay your bills in a certain way. Now everything is done without being in contact with other people. The big changes have been enabled by technology, they've been around employee and customer expectations, they've been around the level of contact that people have with each other and there's been a huge change in transparency, which I think is fueled, you know, a lot of the focus and margin compression that we've seen and speed up of transaction cycle. Even things like algorithmic trading. That that has evolved dramatically over time, but when you step back and look at all of that, a lot of what used to be, you know, pretty good margin businesses have pretty much become commoditized. The question for the future, particularly with costs going down, is how do you remain relevant and what is your competitive advantage? I think that's more challenging today than it was 30 years ago.

Mo Lidsky  18:18

You sit on the board of HSBC, and you've led banks. We've seen an effectively a majorly deflationary environment. How are the big financial institutions thinking about maintaining those profit margins on a go-forward basis, and anything near the scale that that they've had until now?

Eileen Murray  18:40

Well, the profit margins have come down over the last 30 years, right. I think continuing to be focused on the client, digitization in terms of not just digital assets, in terms of crypto, etc., but really digitizing the legacy assets in terms of driving down costs. I also think in terms of evaluating risk more multi dimensionally. Then lastly, I think the winners are going to be the places that really provide great career paths for people. I don't think that's really changed much in terms of that still being a factor. But I think, you know, banks are reinventing themselves. If you look at how Goldman's reinvented itself more recently, in terms of digitization, and you know, how they focus on their clients. At the end of the day, you're still going to need somebody to lend money. So, I think lending is still there in a pretty big way. In terms of retail and credit cards, the consumer side of it, I think that will continue to become digitized. Technology will create more jobs, but I think that, you know, we'll have to really re-tool and re-skill people to take on those new jobs versus what's there today. The financial institutions are going to have to really be part of that change to stay relevant and to stay competitive.

Mo Lidsky  20:14

I do think that every financial institution has to figure out where value is going to be created in a world that's, you know, been progressively deflationary. I think that there are certain challenges, having the industry turn as quickly as I think it will need to. We've seen with COVID, you know, how much innovation has been pulled forward. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. All of the changes that COVID brought forward, what are some of the lasting impacts?

Eileen Murray  21:19

I think the biggest lasting impact, which is probably obvious, is there were a lot of firms that really resisted allowing people to work from home and the mobility of the workforce. Companies were forced to do that, some rather quickly. I don't think we're going back to the day where, you know, everybody sat in the office together. I used to be a big speaker and promoter, Mo, of people working from home 60-70% of the time. I'm not a promoter of 100% of the time. The reason I'm not is I think that you still need to have training and development, some of which takes place, not just on Zoom, but in person. Community and social ways that we work with each other are an important part of an entity's fabric. The days of people arguing about whether you work from home or not, those days are over. I think we have a very mobile workforce. We will continue to have a mobile workforce. A lot of our kids haven't been able to go back to school, you know, and we've been on the zoom calls, or whatever the schools used to get the kids. The whole way we educate and teach people will have changes. I think it's all been moved forward. I agree with you. But the changes have already been enacted. We're going down the path of AI, we're going down the path of robotics, we're going down the path of digital assets, we're going down the path of things being enabled by you know, blockchain technology. COVID has accelerated some of that. Where was Zoom two years ago. Nowhere, right? But things are still in process as to how do industries reinvent themselves. The conferencing industry, that's going to change dramatically. There are so many industries that are changing. They weren't all ready and COVID just accelerated it.

Mo Lidsky  23:49

Amidst those changes, what excites you most over the about the future? In other words, when you look over the horizon, here's the things that I'm most excited about. Here's the things that I'm most scared of. What comes to mind?

Eileen Murray  24:06

Sure. What I'm most excited about is basically the possibilities that technology provides to reduce inequality and to expand education in a very pervasive way. Well, I'm equally most frightened by that. I was reading something that there'll be 27% new jobs in 2022 that people aren't prepared for. How do we go from an education system that's a four-year college or companies educating people? How do we re-tool and re-skill people for the new economy, for the fourth industrial revolution? We have 20th century ways of developing, training, and educating people. We need to really change that in the 21st century. Why is it frightening me? Because if we don't do that, we're going to continue to have a gap in equality, particularly economically which will be driven in part by education. We'll have a lot of unemployment, which, you know, if you've been unemployed for a long time, it creates a hopelessness that becomes part of your psyche for your entire life. There's also a tremendous opportunity here to avoid all of that and to really expand how we look at education. It must be a partnership between both private, public; government and business to figure out how to do this. It's going to be a whole networking, an ecosystem of how we approach that.

Mo Lidsky  26:01

If this displacement that you're describing, which is that the rate of change technologically is occurring faster than the current re-tooling of the workforce. And that will lead to potentially mass unemployment due to automation. Over time, that gap will hopefully be filled. In the meantime, what does that mean for markets? What does that mean for the economy broadly? What does that mean for business owners and capital allocators? What are the ramifications of that?

Eileen Murray  26:33

I think it creates opportunities. They'll be disruptors in the education space, that'll be part of businesses. If there's big unemployment and continued taxation on corporations, that's something that's a big, you know, weight for the economy to carry. If you just step back for a second, I don't believe we should wait for us. These numbers are staggering. McKinsey said 375 million people by 3030 will be out of the workforce, 54 million of them in the United States. 54 million people of the working class is a lot of people. You starting to approach rates that are similar to the depression. Now I'm not saying that there won't be new jobs. I'm just saying that the rate at which you will need to be educated to fill those jobs is pretty staggering. People know what it means for the economy when there's high levels of unemployment and what it means for the markets. I'm not here to give a lesson on that, but I think that's pretty self-evident. Just like with the pandemic, we didn't know the pandemic was coming. You got a bunch of people from many different disciplines, very smart people to look at this problem and figure out how do we solve this problem? There are some things people did that weren't great, some things that were and I think this education issue with the re-tooling and re-scaling is the next pandemic. The unskilled worker.

Mo Lidsky  28:22

You've always been a really vocal proponent of diversity inclusion throughout your career, perhaps because of your background. One of the questions that I had was, let's say everybody was actually 100% committed to diversity and inclusion. We're seeing a diminishing talent pool because people are not being re-tooled. Is the talent pool even there?

Eileen Murray  29:02

I want to just rephrase the way you asked your question. The question, the way you're phrasing it, sounds to me that if we don't re-tool and re-educate, then we won't be able to have diversity and inclusion. I'm not saying you're saying that. I just want to hit that for a second and then come back to re-tooling. When we graduate, let's just use gender as an example, in most of our countries 52% of the graduates are women. They're qualified. Now people will say "well, they're not in the in the areas that are growing", some of that's true, like the STEM areas, the science, engineering, mathematics, etc. so we need more to do there to get those qualifications. But I don't buy the notion that this is just a skill set issue for people who are diverse because we all start out of college and MBA programs on a similar footing. It's really what happens beyond that. Companies have focused dramatically on diversity. The big problem, and I've been talking about this for 20 years, is they don't focus on inclusion. We focus on "hey, I get 10% of those and 20% of these and now I have them in my company and God Bless." You have to work on how you include people. The re-tooling piece is more broad-based than diversity and inclusion. I think it's beyond that. When you look at the numbers, our entire swaths of the population. I would put diversity and inclusion as a pillar of that, but I think it's a bigger issue than diversity and inclusion.

Mo Lidsky  30:55

You're absolutely right. I conflated two things that shouldn't have been conflated. The question was, you know, how do we develop talent in two different areas? Number one is where it needs to be re-tooled. Number two is how do we make sure that that talent is developed with a focus on diversity and inclusion?

Eileen Murray  31:18

No, no, it's okay, I don't mean to be overly sensitive. We have jobs that are going to be there in the future. Are we spending enough time imagining what they are? Are we spending enough time thinking about how do we train and develop people for those opportunities? How do we do it in a way that's sensible? Companies save tons of money laying people off, because of automation, and then they have to re-hire other people. Why don't we have something like a tax credit for companies that, you know, re-tool and rescale people, or regulatory capital benefit? Why don't we, you know, hit companies for half of their savings. I'm making this all this up, I don't have the solution. I wish I did. But what I do think is if we all recognize we have a problem and start thinking about how we solve it. Honestly, Mo, I've talked to people who are like, we don't have a problem with unemployment, we're going to have plenty of jobs. We're going to have plenty of jobs. I agree. But are we going to have the people re-tooled and reskilled to take those jobs? If you only believe half of the numbers that McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte, Ernst and Young, if you only believe half of the numbers that are out there, you'd have to agree with that big problem that's coming ahead of us. Why wait till it happens?

Mo Lidsky  32:44

In terms of the impact that you've seen on companies who've adopted, you know, meaningful diversity and inclusion measures and those that haven't. Is there a way that either allocators of capital or entrepreneurs can measure the tangible benefit?

Eileen Murray  33:07

It's a great question. Allocators of capital have a tremendous power in terms of, you know, helping companies think through what makes the most profitable. There's been study after study, I can send them to you, that diversity results in higher levels of profitability, EBITDA, etc. Now, what hasn't been done is why is that? What is it about diversity? What is it about anybody that causes that? There hasn't been a lot of studies on that. Is it people who are more flexible? Is it people who are more risk-taking? What is it? Without a doubt, the studies over the last 20 years would point to people a lot smarter than me at a lot of these consulting firms, that without a doubt, diversity, you know, improves profitability. If that's true, I'm happy to get the studies, then you would think that people would want there to be more focus on that to get more profitable returns. If you wanted to look at the overall risk of a particular company that market or credit risk, you could pull out their report and see what that is. If you wanted to see how a company manages and develops its people, there aren't standards and transparency around talent development, there aren't standards around diversity and inclusion. There aren't standards around a lot of things in ESG that are clearly going to help companies be more profitable over the long haul. The way there are disclosures in the financial statements. Getting greater levels of disclosure which, I think it would be the first step, you know, because if it's, if it's measured, it'll be managed, would be a great first step. The owners of capital that allocate capital have a huge say in the marketplace as to what is valued.

Mo Lidsky  35:20

You were talking about the introduction of various technologies. You yourself have been an investor and an advisor to various startup ventures in the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Could you give us some examples of how you see AI and machine learning, impacting both investors and consumers of financial services? What are some of the big shifts?

Eileen Murray  35:49

I think a lot of the transaction-type work that's done today lends itself dramatically to automation, which hasn't fully been done yet. Point two on the AI side, you have people using their judgment to look at patterns, particularly in the risk space. Machines looking at those patterns, you have more reliable pattern recognition. You probably have the flags done sooner and you displace people out of those jobs. A lot of the work that's done in credit, much the way you've seen equities, have really become dramatically automated. Now, how do you apply artificial intelligence to that? I think it's a tremendous opportunity and it's already starting to take place in many places.

Mo Lidsky  36:48

You're in the heart and soul of the banks. Are you seeing that actually being implemented?

Eileen Murray  36:56

What you're seeing right now is a continuation of the migration to the cloud, where a lot of people have their focus on. As they are migrating to the cloud and getting more comfortable with that, they're starting to turn their attention to more and more opportunities in analytics to a greater degree than they had before. Honestly, I think we're at the more of the beginning of it than the end of it.

Mo Lidsky  37:28

You touched earlier on, you know, digital assets. How do you see digital assets permeating the financial services industry?

Eileen Murray  37:46

Again, I think we're at the beginning, but I think digital assets are here to stay. They're a way to exchange value. The technology itself has issues with it. It's like when we started with the internet, people were only comfortable doing an intranet because they somehow felt safer. Digital currencies, four years ago, people, you know, weren't  frightened by them. I think people are becoming more and more comfortable with digital assets, they're becoming more and more comfortable with the efficiencies that are provided by them. But they also are concerned about how do you use it in scale and size? What are some of the security issues with it? As the technology evolves, those issues will find resolution. Digital assets are here to say and the efficiency of them I don't think is really arguable.

Mo Lidsky  38:51

One of the previous speakers that we had, we were talking a little bit about non-fungible tokens and NFTS. How is value established in digital assets? Which is kind of hard to wrap your head around. How do you view that evolution?

Eileen Murray  39:21

I think on the first one, you said that it's clear that you could exchange, be an artwork or whatever it is you want to exchange, digitally. We're migrating from a physical world to a digital world. Where those two overlap? In other words, if I bought a digital painting, would I be happy with just the digital record of that and not the physical painting? Probably not. I wouldn't be. In terms of the actual value of a currency from a digital perspective that's still evolving, and there's lots of questions around that. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to have the answer on that, but there's certainly a lot of value ascribed to it. I see more value in the digitization and in the ability to exchange assets more rapidly. Then I see that crypto is nothing more as an exchange for $1 or some other currency to be able to do that. The value technically goes through supply and demand, but even that's being turned on inside there.

Mo Lidsky  40:40

Even in the short conversation, we've touched on a lot of things that you're involved in. A lot of organizations, projects, boards, advising startups, serving as chair of a major regulatory authority. How do you pick and choose the things that you get involved with? Could you also talk a little bit about the traits of the people that you look to work with and those that you wouldn't?

Eileen Murray  41:07

First of all, I like to continuously learn and stay relevant. I think technology is here to stay. If I don't continue to learn about technology, its applications and what it enables, I could see myself becoming less relevant. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a programmer, but what the capabilities of these technologies are mind blowing. I really enjoy learning about that.  guess the new term that's coined is the fourth revolution, right? I'm really enjoy learning that, and then how can I apply it. Before that, I've spent a lot of my career working with some really great people, and I've worked with some people I would prefer not to work with. Now I'm at a point in my life, where I get to choose who I work with. That's really important to me. As you get older, you realize time is a very precious commodity. Who you spend time with, for me, has become an incredibly important part of my life? I want to spend time with people who are curious, have integrity, if possible, have a low ego, but not a requirement, and who are open-minded. That to me is so joyous. It's joyful to spend my time with people like that. Earlier in this conversation, I've said that God's been very good to me. I want to make sure that, you know, I'm having impact, to the best of my ability, in terms of what I'm doing. The bigger connection for me is working with great people who want to make changes for the better, and who are good people that I like to spend time with. And like I said, hopefully having impact. There's lots of places we can all have impact. Who you have impact with may not matter to you, but it matters to me now? Those are the qualities that that I look for.

Mo Lidsky  43:40

Anything still sits on your bucket list in terms of what you still hope to achieve?

Eileen Murray  43:45

I have to tell you the truth, I never set out with "I want to achieve X, Y and Z". I never said, "in three years I'll be here or in four years I'll be there". I'm kind of more of where things take me. As long as I'm having impact and I'm spending time at home, that would be good enough for me.

Mo Lidsky  44:15

When you think about some of your own role models and personal inspirations, I'm curious as to who those people are, and what might have been the best pieces of advice or wisdom that anyone has parted on you.

Eileen Murray  44:35

I'm going to say something that I really sincerely mean, and it took me time to understand this. The person I've learned the most from in my life, even though my business career, is my mother. I remember, you know, after 9/11, I was down in the city for three days straight, you know, helping understand what was going on with the financial systems and I was at Morgan Stanley, we had tons of people down at the World Trade Center which was awful. There were certain ways that people reacted during that process that I didn't feel was consistent with my values. On the other side of the coin, to be honest with you, Mo, I was like, "Geez, I've been at Morgan Stanley for almost 20 years, I don't even know if I'm good enough to work anywhere else." I was going through this and torturing myself for months and, and I talked to my mother, and she said, "I don't know what you do for a living. I really don't. But what I do know is one thing, if you're not true to who you are, and you're not true to your values, you're going to be a miserable person. Whatever it is, you're frightened up, forget it because that's the most frightening thing for you." And I was like, Jesus, she's right, it was time for me to leave. My mother was incredibly generous and had very little, but I won't go into that story. Throughout my life, she really impacted me tremendously and believe me, she didn't have it easy.  From a professional perspective, I'd say the person who was the most helpful to me was a guy by the name of John Mack. John Mack was someone who was incredibly tough, but fair. He really didn't care if you were a woman as long as you got the job done and you did it well. He was a terrific sponsor of mine for many, many years, and ultimately a mentor. He was someone who grew up in North Carolina, son of a shopkeeper. His parents were from Lebanon, they were Catholics down in North Carolina. He knew what it was like to be on the outside. He made sure he created environments for everyone to be on the insides as long as they did a good job. He was very courageous. He didn't have to do that. He could have picked people that would have been easier for him to pick. But he really valued people. He valued teamwork and he went out of his way to be a champion for diversity and inclusion before anyone even use those words. I feel very fortunate to have worked for him. He's still a good friend. His honesty and integrity, I would say, second to none.

Mo Lidsky  47:53

Just before we wrap up, I firstly, I asked you about some of your role models, inspirations, best pieces of advice. Are there any books or writings that you credit with materially having shifted or transformed you?

Eileen Murray  48:08

There's a book by Kahil Gibran called Prophet, which I'm sure you've read, I'm sure many people have read. You know those little books you get an eighth grade when you graduate, and people write those silly things in it. My father wrote me something from Kahil Gibran, which at the time I was like, why the hell he wrote this? I've read the Prophet probably 8, 9, 10 times, and I always get something out of it. Always. It's about, you know, life and people. I've read many technical books, but for me, the Prophet has, has really inspired me to really reflect on things in a way that without that, I wonder if I would have.

Mo Lidsky  49:02

We spoke a lot about your success in your career, but you've also done a lot of really interesting things on the philanthropic side of things. How do you decide what it is that you're going to invest your time and money into from a philanthropic point of view? How have you evolved some of your giving and donating all of your time, resources and energy and creativity to?

Eileen Murray  49:34

It's a great question. I'm on the Irish Art Center, which I love and honestly, I initially went on it because my mother asked me to, but I loved it. I'm involved in how you retain the culture, the history and how to give money to that because a lot of it's not retained and then I've been involved in the YMCA  as a board member. I've been involved in a number of boards. What I found for me, Mo, is I prefer to be more involved than a board member. For example, I was on the board of Manhattan college, and I would always go and hang out with the student governing body because I want to know what's going on in the place. What can I really change? I basically spend my time on two areas. One, education. For example, the pathfinders for after school education and on the Irish Art Center. I give money to things, but for me, it's my time that's more valuable. I'm thinking about what else I'm going to add to that and probably something to do with education or children. What I'm also trying to do is, is spend more time with my family. I have 33, nieces and nephews, and they, you know, I can't spend time with all of them. I don't even know if I'd like to, but a bunch of them I do. You only get an opportunity for kids to be a certain age once. How many times do we go to work or how many times we do this next thing versus stopping and spending time with children? And really helping them through the experiences you may have had. I know it probably sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but I've watched so many people not spend time with their parents, not spend time with their kids. Yet they're very, very successful and I say to myself, is that really successful? I'm not so sure. Sorry, I wasn't more structured. I didn't prepare for this because I just have to say I felt so comfortable with you. I was like, we're just going to have a great conversation and I'm not going to prepare for it because in some ways I've been preparing all my life. You've been incredibly fair and gracious, and the reason for what you're doing this, I think is just terrific.

Mo Lidsky  52:23

Really appreciate that. So, thank you again, for joining us for sharing your incredible insights with us. We know how valuable your time and your wisdom are. And we really hope we can do this again soon.

Eileen Murray  52:42

I'd leave it at this last thought. There are so many things that are simple sayings that if we incorporated them into our lives, everything else works a lot better. Work, family, everything. And we all we all forget that, right? We put the urgent before the important.

Mo Lidsky  54:05

Thank you again, Eileen. And thank you for all our participants. Really appreciate you joining us. If you haven't yet donated, please do so by going to the Donate page at the top right of the site, so we could continue strengthening pediatric mental health in our community. We are really grateful for your participation and wishing you and everyone on this call a most wonderful day. Thank you.