Money Tips from Machiavelli to have more power in the workplace with author Stacey Vanek Smith

Want to have more power in the workplace? NPR’s Stacey Vanek Smith’s new book Machiavelli for Women takes the lessons from Machiacelli’s The Prince to give some specific and realistic ways to succeed.


Money Tips

Some money tips from the many amazing women Stacey references and interviews in her new book, Machiavelli for Women.


  1. The money tip from Ruth Bader Ginsburg RBG about being interrupted and mansplained while being a Supreme Court justice.

  2. The money tip from Sally Krawcheck on why people were much more open and receptive to an idea when using humor or distancing yourself from a controversial idea.

  3. The money tip from Janet Yellen on why it’s important to create a place where people want to work and why making them feel supported is also so important.

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Full Transcript:


Bobbi Rebell:
I hope you guys are all celebrating some big adulting milestones this season. And you know what? Finding the perfect gift for those celebrations can be kind of tough. I have the solution over at grownupgear.com. We have adorable hats, totes, mugs, pillows, teas, and seriously, the most cozy and comfortable sweatshirts. They're all on grownupgear.com and all at affordable prices. We even now have digital gift certificates if you can't decide. Use code grownup for 15% off your first order. Buying from our small business helps to support this free podcast. And you know what? We really appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
A lot of the advice is cringy and it does feel backwards. It is disturbing to me to say stuff like, "If you smile more in an interview or bring up a personal or social connection with someone, you're more likely to get what you're negotiating. The negotiation is more likely to be successful." Or, "If you go into a negotiation with an adversarial attitude or you're feeling very assertive, that really could backfire. People will see you as pushy or aggressive. You should go in with a more collaborative, friendly attitude."

Bobbi Rebell:
You're listening to Money Tips for Financial Grownups, with me, certified financial planner, Bobbi Rebell, author of How To Be A Financial Grownup. And you know what? When it comes to money, being a grownup is hard, but together we've got this.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, my friends. In the words of our guest this week, a lot of the advice she's going to give is cringy. It is even disturbing and it feels kind of backwards, but the sad truth is that, well, it works. I've been trying it out, and she's right. I am talking about Stacey Vanek Smith. If you listen to public radio, you know her as the superstar journalist from NPR's Planet Money and The Indicator from Planet Money. She is out with a new book, Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win in the Workplace. It is a very high concept book. Stacey takes the 500-year-old ideas of Machiavelli and uses them as a reference point for advice for present date women. And guess what? The advice is really not what we usually hear at all. I'll share my thoughts about the book on the other side of the interview, but let's get right into it. Here is Stacey Vanek Smith. Stacey Vanek Smith, you're a financial grownup. Welcome to the podcast.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Thanks, Bobbi. Thank you for having me.

Bobbi Rebell:
I am holding up, even though no one can see it as usual, I always seem to do that,, your new book Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace. This is a really ambitious book. How did you even come up with this concept of bringing in this 500-year-old manuscript book from Machiavelli that people really associate with male power to this concept to female power?

Stacey Vanek Smith:
To be honest, I kind of backed into the Machiavelli part. This book came about because I was frustrated personally. I've been covering business and economics for about 15 years in public radio, always in public radio. I had been, as part of that job, talking to a lot of economists, talking to a lot of business leaders, talking to CEOs. And so many of them are men. Economics is 75% male. CEOs are 80% male. For Fortune 500 companies, it's 90% male. And then the things like the gender pay gap. Women make about 80 cents on the dollar compared to what men make. That has been stuck for 10 years. At the same time in my own career, I've been reading a lot of advice books and listening to a lot of advice and just being really frustrated with the advice being offered to women. I felt like a lot of it didn't resonate with me.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
I feel like there's a lot of girl power stuff that in my experience has not worked well. And then when I tried to use advice geared towards men, that definitely didn't work well. And I just wanted the truth. I just wanted some real advice. I was like, "Just give it to me straight." My mind just kept going back to Machiavelli. This class I had taken in college, I had read Machiavelli for that class and I hated Machiavelli. I thought he was so cynical and just very basic and obsessed with stupid things I didn't care about like crushing people and power and having... I didn't care about any of that stuff, obviously. I went into public radio. If I cared about money and power, I wouldn't have gotten into public radio. But I started thinking about Machiavelli and I re-read The Prince and all these lights went off in my brain. And that's how the project got started.

Bobbi Rebell:
Some of the advice, in your own words, that you give in this book is pretty disturbing. Tell us, what do you see as disturbing in this book?

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Yes, it's really disturbing. People have told me this. They're like, "A lot of the advice is cringy. It feels backwards." A lot of the advice is cringy and it does feel backwards. It is disturbing to me to say stuff like, "If you smile more in an interview or bring up a personal or social connection with someone, you're more likely to get what you're negotiating. The negotiation is more likely to be successful." Or, "If you go into a negotiation with an adversarial attitude or you're feeling very assertive, that really could backfire. People will see you as pushy or aggressive. You should go in with a more collaborative, friendly attitude." That is disturbing to me. But what is way more disturbing to me is that women are twice as likely to live in poverty after age 65 or that 80% of CEOs are men. That women are not getting the funding they need for their companies, so that even though 40% of businesses are started by women, 2% of venture capital goes to women.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
So, women's businesses were far more likely to fail during the pandemic because they just weren't capitalized. The same is true for minorities and the funding for those businesses actually fell last year, which is amazing to me. That is far more disturbing to me. And so a lot of the advice is advice I wish I didn't have to give. I wish that a lot of it we're different, but we are living in an unfair structure. All you have to do is look at the data and you see it. We're living inside of an economy that is not fair. And it is, also, it is a structure that is very powerful. It is a lot. There's a lot of money in our economy. There's a lot of power in our economy. It is changing, but it's changing pretty slowly and in certain ways it's stuck. And if you want to navigate it, I just at least wanted to give people the tools that they needed to navigate it and I wanted to be as honest as I could.

Bobbi Rebell:
And it's hard to hear because I know I've been coached to not put, let's say, a little smiley face in an email or to not have these little soft filler sentences in there. But the truth is, you say in the book, that works when coming from a woman.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Oh, yes. The softener. This is super interesting to me, too. So, I've been beating myself up about this for years. Overuse of exclamation points, overuse of emoji, lots of softeners. "Hey, how's it going? I was just wondering if XYZ." And I've been beating myself up about this. Why do I say this all the time? Why do I say things like, "You know, I was just thinking." Why do I say this when I'm introducing an idea? But studies show that men actually are more open to ideas and retain things that women say more when softeners are used. Softeners work. That's why we use them.

Bobbi Rebell:
Absolutely. And it's interesting because, as I said, we have been coached to take those out. In terms of money tips, one thing that I really enjoyed in the book is that you refer to and interview some incredible women. So, I want to go through three of my favorites. So, the first one that you reference is RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with some mansplaining and interrupting that famously went on with someone that actually was before her. I mean, she was in the position of power and yet this was happening. Tell us about that and how she dealt with it and what people can take away from that.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
This is one of the most amazing anecdotes in the book. It came from a study that came out a few years ago that looked at Supreme Court transcripts to study interruptions. And what they found was that female justices on the Supreme Court got interrupted three times more often than male justices, even though they spoke less and used fewer words when they did speak. What was even more shocking was that the lawyers arguing cases before the Supreme Court were also interrupting female justices, even though they are not allowed to interrupt justices. They would just jump in and interrupt female justices quite frequently, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And as someone who has really struggled to be heard...

Stacey Vanek Smith:
I'm in media so it's a lot of pitch meetings, ideas meetings. I've had my ideas stolen a million times. I've been talked over, interrupted, people forget I said things all the time. I mean, this is something that's definitely happened to me in my career in life. And I felt so relieved. Just like, "This happens to Ruth Bader Ginsburg?" I thought I was just messing up. But no, if it's happening to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I think you can assume that it happens to literally everyone. It's just most of us don't have as much power as Ruth Bader Ginsburg had.

Bobbi Rebell:
Another incredible woman that you did talk to in the book is Sallie Krawcheck. She's featured pretty prominently throughout the book. There's some things that you reveal in the book and I'm going to just leave it to people. I'm going to tell people it's on page 85. So, you can go to the book and look it up when you buy the book. You can learn about some of the truly offensive things that I don't even want to go there on this podcast. What's the Machiavellian lesson that we learn from her? She has a great sense of humor.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
She has a great sense of humor, and she's so honest and she sees so clearly. It was such a privilege to talk with her because when I asked questions, she never couched anything. She was just completely direct and honest. I learned a lot of things from her. One of my favorite lessons from Sallie was she said, "A lesson I think people don't get enough is that this is not your fault." She's like, "It ends up kind of falling on women and marginalized workers to deal with an unfair workplace. But the fact the workplace is unfair is not your fault. And the fact that it's falling on you to deal with it is really unfair." There was a lot of relief in that because, I mean, all the time and energy we spend strategizing to get paid more, to get promoted more quickly, or to get promoted at an equal level as our white male colleagues with hair, that's time we could be spending on other things, on life or Netflix or coming up with brilliant ideas or playing with our kids.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Instead, we have to spend it doing things like reading articles on how to get more out of your negotiation, trying to figure out why you're underpaid and things like that. My other favorite pieces of advice from Sallie Krawcheck had to do with leadership. Of course, she was working in the super male world of Wall Street, super male world of Wall Street, and trying to give orders to people who did not necessarily want to take direction from a woman, were not excited about that. Two things she said she would do. One, she used humor. Humor as a softener, actually. She would use humor and make jokes. And she said, "It's really hard for people to hate you if they're laughing with you," which I thought was pretty brilliant.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
And the other thing she would do is distance herself from her ideas. And I've started using this and it's amazing how well it works. So, I mean, if she felt very strongly like, "We need to go in direction B," she would just say, "You know, I was just thinking, I'm not sure I believe this, but why don't we try direction B and just see how that works out?" And she said people were much more open and receptive than they were if she came guns blazing out of the gate, "I feel strongly we need to go in direction B."

Bobbi Rebell:
And that brings us to the third woman that I want to highlight, which is Janet Yellen. So, former Fed chair, treasury secretary. You titled her section, The Power of Preparation and Pulling Up Your Socks. Tell us more about her style because she really took a feminine approach to managing an office. Again, very male environment at the Fed.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Janet Yellen told me that she did not think managing people was hard. She was like, "You just tell people that you value their work, you support them in their work, and you make sure they feel valued." And I was like, "Oh, well, yeah." But I think part of the reason Janet Yellen has gotten so much support is because that is what she gives people. She gives people support. She thinks about what will make them happy, what will motivate them. And I mean, it's very simple, but I mean, not all managers do that. I would say almost no managers do that. It's really rare. And the fact she just said, "Oh, managing people isn't hard," was hilarious to me, but I think she comes by it honestly. I think she just cares about the work and respects the people doing the work and conveys that.

Bobbi Rebell:
Well, I think that represents one of the common themes in the book, which is that you have to be very practical. You can be idealistic and say, "I don't want to be the woman that gets my ideas heard because I have a sense of humor and make people laugh or present them in a softer way," as with Sallie Krawcheck, or with Janet Yellen talking about, "I just want to have a place where people want to work." But perception and what we want to be isn't always the practical solution. And I love that this book has a lot of very specific and practical ideas for the readers. It also has a lot of you in it. It's very personal. You reveal a lot that I did not know. I've listened to your work for as long as I could remember. Tell us, why did you get so personal? Because you do reveal a lot of vulnerable moments in your life.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Yes. That was a conscious choice simply because, for me reading books about career advice, the advice always seems to be given a little bit from on high, like from an expert, and it makes it very hard to connect with people. So, I wanted to be very honest about where I was coming from. I'm like, "Listen, I don't like negotiating. Historically, I've been abysmally terrible at it. I have not had success in negotiation. I've avoided them studiously, for years often." I wanted to be honest about where I was coming from, because that is honestly where I was coming from. I have a lot of these issues I was exploring for myself. I didn't know what I would find. I didn't know what the research would show. I didn't know what people would say. But I wanted to be honest about my own experiences, the good and the bad, just so that people would understand that I've also been through this, too, some of these things.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
I wanted to be honest about the experiences that I had had in the hopes that it would make people who are maybe frustrated feel less alone. And also that they would know that it wasn't just like, "Oh, well I have had this transplendent career with no moments of self-doubt and I've just gone from peak to peak and it's been amazing, but I understand some of you people are having trouble, so here's my advice." I wanted to be totally honest about some of the experiences and some of the hardest experiences in my career. I thought that vulnerability was important.

Bobbi Rebell:
Yeah, I agree. And I think that it really works for the book and I think it's going to be very appreciated by the readers. And I know it certainly really hit home with me because I put you on a pedestal and hearing that there were times that really sucked in your career and knowing that, I think, makes you so much more relatable. It makes the book so much more relatable, and I really think it is appreciated. Stacey Vanek Smith, this has been so wonderful. Tell us more. We know the book is going to be everywhere. Where can people reach you? Besides, of course, hosting. We didn't even say. You host The Indicator.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
I host the podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. There's my website, which is staceyvaneksmith.com. I wasn't very creative in the naming of it, but you can contact me through that site. I'm also on Twitter @svaneksmith, V-A-N-E-K Smith. Or Facebook, or I'm also on LinkedIn. So, you can message me any of those ways. And oh, I'm also on Instagram. All the social media things, or you can just email me through my website.

Bobbi Rebell:
Thank you so much.

Stacey Vanek Smith:
Thank you so much, Bobbi. It was such a pleasure.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, friends, a brief recap. You were warned. The advice is, yeah, I think you guys all agree with me, it's pretty cringy. But it works. And we have proof now because we talked about three women in our interview, and if you go through the book, there's a lot more real life examples of exactly how, well, kind of messed up it is, but better to know than to be ignorant. And we learned that even some of the most remarkable women, we talked about RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sallie Krawcheck, and Janet Yellen, they've had to use these Machiavellian principles to manage their careers. And yes, even all-star journalists like Stacey Vanek Smith have had major career setbacks by doing what we're kind of told to do even though, as we know, it's not what works. The hardest part about this interview was actually having to end it because there is so much we did not get to, but it's all in the book.

Bobbi Rebell:
And so I hope you guys are going to step up and challenge yourself and pick up a copy. So, this book, maybe it feels a little intimidating when you first see it. Trust me, it is worth the effort. And once you get into it, you're not going to be able to put it down. Settle in. Read it this fall. Most of the books here, I talk about being a quick read, page-turners and so on. And there are times when I meant to put down the book and it was the end of a chapter and I said, "Oh, I'm going go and make dinner and do something else," but then I read just a few more pages and got back into it. But honestly, this is a book to savor and really let the concepts settle in and sometimes flip back and reread a little section to make sure that you really get the point and can apply it to what's going on in your life. It's worth it.

Bobbi Rebell:
Okay, my friends. This podcast, it's free and that's wonderful. I put so much effort into it and I want to spread the word. I want to grow my audience and I need your help. Please share it with your friends, post on social media, and if you're not already, please do follow or subscribe depending on what podcast platform you listen to. They use different words these days. I think you know what I mean. We want to make sure that you get the podcasts on a regular basis. And by the way, if that platform is Apple or any other platform that allows reviews, please leave a review. I read them all and I truly appreciate all of your support. I also appreciate the fabulous Stacey Vanek Smith, author of Machiavelli for Women, for helping us all be financial grownups.

Bobbi Rebell:
Money Tips for Financial Grownups is a production of BRK media, LLC. Editing and production by Steve Stewart. Guest coordination, content creation, social media support and show notes by Ashley [Wall 00:19:14]. You can find the podcast show notes, which includes links to resources mentioned in the show as well as show transcripts, by going to my website, bobbirebell.com. You can also find an incredible library of hundreds of previous episodes to help you on your journey as a financial grownup. The podcast and tons of complimentary resources associated with the podcast is brought to you for free, but I need to have your support in return. Here's how you can do that. First, connect with me on social media at bobbirebell1 on Instagram and bobbirebell on both Twitter and on Clubhouse, where you can join my Money Tips for Grownups club. Second, share this podcast on social media and tag me so I can thank you.

Bobbi Rebell:
You can also leave a review on Apple podcasts. Reading each one means the world to me. You know what? It really motivates others to subscribe. You can also support our merchant shop, grownupgear.com, by picking up fun gifts for your grownup friends and treating yourself as well. And most of all, help your friends on their journey to being financial grownups by encouraging them to subscribe to the podcast. Together, we got this. Thank you for your time and for the kind words so many of you send my way. See you next time, and thank you for supporting Money Tips for Financial Grownups.

Advice, Authors, Career, Financial Grownup, Money, Women Role Models, Role ModelsBobbi Rebell KaufmanMachiavelli, Machiavelli for Women, Author, Stacey Vanek Smith, Podcast Host, The Indicator, Planet Money, Money Tips