The Confidence Code Read Online Free Page B

Washington, DC, restaurant, wearing a refined dark tweed dress, radiated self-assurance with a distinct flair. As she walked through the chic restaurant, heads swiveled as diners recognized one of the most powerful women in the world. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, the 188-country organization whose mission is to stabilize the world’s financial systems, loan money to selected countries, and force reform on those that need it. Suffice it to say, she’d been busy.
    Since we conceived of this project, we imagined Lagarde as one of the best possible guides through this confidence thicket. She claims a powerful position in the almost all-male club of global finance titans and she uses her formidable profile to pressure companies and heads of state to get women to the top—not because it’s politically correct but because, she believes, it is good for the health of the world economy. She makes the same arguments we did in Womenomics —diversity helps the bottom line.
    Fittingly, perhaps, she got her current job because, as she was helping to stave off the global financial meltdown from her post as the French finance minister, her IMF predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was also on the short list to run for president of France, was discovered to have been routinely cheating on his glamorous and successful wife. One might think such a résumé should make him even more qualified to be a French president. But the womanizing included allegations that he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid and a journalist. The case involving the maid was eventually dropped, but the scandal was a front-page story in the United States, and it eventually caught on across the Atlantic. It turns out that there is a line you can cross in France on the issue of sex.
    Lagarde was deemed the best person to set things right. Her weapons—a rational, conciliatory style and straightforward smarts—helped to calm the testosterone-fueled international economic crisis and quell internal politics at the IMF.
    When we met Lagarde in person, we were struck by her regal bearing and the chic, thick white hair framing her face in a feminine but not fussy way. (Her only flourish was a subtly patterned silk scarf, draped around her neck in an elegant style neither of us had ever seen, and certainly could never master. Infuriatingly French.) She introduced herself with a friendly, piercing look, and then smiled. She was charming and open as she told us about her two grown-up sons, her preference for biking rather than driving around Washington, and her long-distance French boyfriend.
    Raised and educated in France, she spent a year after high school as an intern at the U.S. Capitol. After law school in Paris, she decided to return to the States after a boss at a French law firm told her that, as a woman, she would never make partner there. In fifteen years, she’d not only become a partner at Baker & McKenzie, a top Chicago-based international law firm, but also its first female chairman.
    Over grilled trout and wilted spinach, she recalled plenty of self-doubt as she worked her way up the ladder. “I would often get nervous about presentations or speaking, and there were moments when I had to screw up my courage to raise my hand or make a point, rather than hanging back.”
    And what’s more, this woman who sits down in meetings next to some of the most powerful men in the world and proceeds to tell them they need to change their ways and run their economies differently still worries about being caught off guard. “There are moments where I have to sort of go deep inside myself and pull my strength, confidence, background, history, experience and all the rest of it, to assert a particular point.”
    To compensate, we learned over the course of the meal, Lagarde zealously overprepares for everything. And with whom does she commiserate about how difficult that is? One of the few women at her altitude—the German chancellor.
    “Angela