Myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer, even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . Did you always know that you wanted to run fidelity, and did you feel any pressure to go and run fidelity when you were younger . Abigail i never felt any pressure to and i certainly never knew that i would actually get to the position that i have gotten to now. I was always interested in the business. It was impossible not to learn about it. Between my grandfather and my father, they were both passionate investors, and they both loved the idea of building a business that focused on taking care of its customers. And i always wanted to be involved with it. But of course, when you are young, you do not know where life is going to take you. David your grandfather started the company in 1946. Abigail he began life as a lawyer. And the family lore is he was frustrated and bored being a lawyer. And he got interested in investing and loved the stock market, and he gradually drifted away from his practice of law. And this would have been in the 1940s, shortly after the securities act of 1940, which was the foundation that enabled mutual funds to come into existence. And he purchased a small legal entity called the Fidelity Fund that had one employee, and began using that legal entity to run money for friends, extended family, networks of people and and that was how the business began. David your father, most of his career was at fidelity . Abigail the organization was small when he joined. It was basically an investment boutique. And his father, yes, was president and ceo. And there were probably several hundred employees at the time and he was one of them. David so what did fidelity do or your father do to make fidelity become so large and so successful . Abigail the key ingredient was, he had that passion that my grandfather had for investing. But he also had a passion for building a business. And that was something i think that my grandfather probably did not have, because he was completely focused on being a great investor. And my father had a vision to do more than just have a great investment capability. He wanted to build a business that would extend and expand, and be sustainable beyond any market cycle. David so you are growing up in boston. Your father is building a company that is becoming one of the biggest mutual Fund Complexes in the world. Was it complicated growing up with your father and family being so famous, or were you relatively anonymous as a child . Abigail we were not famous at all. David you werent . Abigail abigail this was the equity market in the 1970s, david. Nobody in the equity markets in the 1970s was famous. People thought the equity markets were dying back then. I mean people were asking my father, why are you still doing this . David so you grew up relatively modestly, you would say . Abigail we were comfortable, but not any lifestyle that anybody would be wanting to show on t. V. , or be particularly impressed with. [laughter] david you knew you wanted to go into business and go to Harvard Business school, or not . Abigail i was definitely thinking about Business School, but i would not say i had the confidence to be sure that i could actually make it there and be successful. After i finished in college, i wanted to go into business and get a Good Business experience. I had worked at fidelity during the summers, so i came here to new york and i worked in the strategy practice for Management Consulting firm booz allen hamilton, you know well, and that was a great experience. I had been a liberal arts undergrad, so being immersed in business analytic challenges was a terrific experience. David did your father say, ok, now you have an obligation to come into the Family Business . Abigail he never said i had an obligation to come into the Family Business. And it is interesting because both of my parents always encouraged me and my siblings to do what we wanted to do. Do the things that we were most passionate about with our lives. And my father in particular, he, his family, his fathers family, before his father had become a lawyer, they had a dry goods store. And they had run it in their family for a couple of generations. And his uncle had been pressured by his family to go work in the dry goods store. And he hated it. He did not enjoy the work. He did it because he was pressured by his family to follow this tradition and go into the Family Business, and it made a real impression on my father. And he said i never want to pressure my kids because i would not ever want my kids to have this life that his uncle had. David on your own you chose to go to the business. And did your father say that if you work hard in 20 years or 30 years, you will be the ceo . Or did he never promised that . Abigail no. He never, he was not a guy who made promises to anybody. David so when you are working in a Family Business, and your father is the ceo, is it awkward at times because people presume that you are going to rise up because of your family connections . Abigail it can be awkward, particularly when people dont know you. If people dont know you, they tend to presume something about you and it tends to be one extreme or the other. But as with any work environment, everybody has to show up for work and do their best job that they can to produce the best work product that they can and make their contribution to the business. Over time, people get to know you, and they appreciate you for what you do. And do not forget, after my very early days as an intern, the part of the business i went into was the asset management, the Equity Management part. And as an equity analyst, you are given responsibility for a group of stocks and you have to make recommendations as to whether the fund manager should buy, sell, or hold the stocks. And you are judged by how well you do on your recommendations. So if you tell all the Fund Managers to buy stocks that go down, then you do not do so well. And no one can really excuse that. David what do you think investors mostly want . Low fees, good service or high returns . Abigail everything, they want all three of those. And you better be doing more of every single one of those every year or you will find yourself behind. David lets talk about fidelity now. How big is it . How much money do you manage at fidelity . Abigail we have almost 6 trillion under administration. So that includes money that we manage and money that we record keep that other people manage. We manage over 2 trillion, about 2. 5 trillion in equities, fixed income, money markets, and other assets. David so your company is privately owned, so it is owned by the people that work there and your family. Abigail yes. David any Investment Bankers ever come along and say you should take this public . That ever happen . Abigail it has happened. [laughter] david the chance of that is zero, i assume . Abigail i havent been by the time i came along, all the Investment Bankers had given up on making that pitch because they made it to my father so many times and it never went anywhere. David what is the reason why you dont want to take the Company Public . Abigail as with a lot of things, there are tradeoffs. So i would say the first thing that my father always said is, we do not need the capital that going public would bring us. So if we dont need the money, why would we go ask for it . I would say beyond that, it is nice to have the flexibility of having the financial accountability being a little tighter. So for example, we do not have to go through the practice of reporting publicly our quarterly earnings. That is explaining the earnings to a broad audience. Now we do watch our earnings very carefully, because it is all of our money that is the capital base of the company. So dont be confused, returns matter. They matter a lot. But the consistency of the returns probably matters less because everybody is in for the longterm. People are not trading in and out. We do not have the benefit of having a public currency to be acquisitive, which is one reason why we generally have not done acquisitions of other companies. Most companies that are acquisitive do it using their publicly traded securities. David the company is privately owned, but it is not owned only by your family. Is that right . Abigail yes. David about half of it is owned by the people that work there . Is that right . Abigail yes. David your father decided to do that, obviously, for some reason because he owned 100 , the family did. So why did he decide to let the employees own roughly half the company . Abigail well, he always thought it was important to have partners. And this is a very competitive business, where we are trying to attract and retain the best talent. And the decisions that you have to grapple with are often complicated decisions. So it is important to have partners. So that is how you have partners, is make them shareholders with you. David fidelity is famous for actively managed funds, actively managed means you have people picking stocks, so forth, as peter lynch did with fidelity magellan. In recent years, index funds have come along, etfs and so forth. Do you provide those, and are they competitive with you, or you dont care whether somebody wants to go etf fund or actively managed fund . Abigail we want to bring products and services to people that help them meet their investment objectives. So any reasonable product is something that we are interested in. We have a very robust line of index funds right now. And we are doing great in that business. We have got the lowest fees. We have got great service. We also have a partnership to have a full range of etfs, some of them are proprietary etfs, some of them are not. So our goal is to have everything that someone could reasonably want on our platform, and make it available to them in a way that is the most value added. David well you mentioned low fees and good service, but what do you think investors mostly want . Low fees, good service or high returns . Abigail everything. [laughter] they want all three and you of those, and you better be doing more of every single one of those every year or you will find yourself behind. Because every year, i tell everybody because it is what i hear from our customers give me more, and give it to me for less money. David who manages your money . Does fidelity manage your money . Does that person get nervous if the stock goes down because you are the ceo . They dont get nervous . [laughter] abigail i think part of my role as a ceo is to also experience the company as a customer. So i do have a couple of our reps who work as a team, who call me several times a year and take me through the portfolio. David ok. Abigail we talk about what is going on with the different funds that i am invested in. And of course i know through other avenues, but i want to hear from them how they explain it. It also gives me a chance to ask them questions too. David you are on many lists as being one of the wealthiest people in the united states. Does that upset you when you see these forbes lists or bloomberg lists that say you are one of the wealthiest people, and do you feel particularly wealthy, and how how does that affect your life when you see numbers attached to your name . Abigail i would just assume to not see a lot of numbers attached to my name, but that is probably inevitable of what happens in the world today. People want to speculate about things and people seem to like putting numbers next to peoples names. But i dont think that reflects anything about what you are and how you live your life, and what you do. I certainly lead a comfortable life, but i was raised by parents who a father who was an equity manager in the 1970s. My mother is a real new englander who likes to live frugally and she does not like a lot of excess. David talk about the difference between building a company and going into one which someone else has built . Abigail with a big company you have that big thing up and going. You have got that machine in motion. Sometimes it is hard to get people to think about what is the next new thing. I talk to people often about looking out at the horizon. What is on the horizon . What is beyond the horizon . David lets talk about your role as ceo. 45,000 employees, do you have to travel the world to see them . Abigail i spend a lot of time traveling because we have major campuses all around the country. We also have our International Company with different locations all around the world. So i try to make sure that i get a balance between being in front of employees, being in front of customers. Almost every time i visit a major location around the u. S. , i do a town hall meeting. I hit as many of our client events as i can because that is a great opportunity to go and see a group of clients in a very efficient way. David and you have a preference for flying commercial, you have told me. Abigail i am traipsing through airports and getting on planes all the time. David do people recognize you and come up and say gimme some money advice . Do people recognize you or not that much . [laughter] abigail usually the people that recognize me are employees. So if i am in a city with a big a big base of employees, i am likely to be recognized. Occasionally clients recognize me, but not generally. David after the show, they certainly will recognize you. Abigail yes, absolutely. [laughter] david do you feel pressure to recruit other women, to be a role model for women . Abigail i think this is a terrific business for women. Asset management in particular i think is a great career for women. The idea that you come in and you are responsible for covering a bunch of securities and making recommendations. It is your responsibility to do that work. You get to structure your time, and ultimately build your own personal franchise being good at that. That is a great opportunity for women, i believe. And in our organization, we have some very senior women, in addition to myself. And we have a real need in our business right now to recruit more women because when women, customers come into our branches, very often, the first thing they say when we are trying to get them paired up with a rep is, i would like to work with a woman. We do not have enough women who are customerfacing reps to serve all the women customers who come in. David they say that because they presume women are better Money Managers . You would agree with that . Abigail they might be thinking that, but they might be thinking, i am just more comfortable talking to a woman. And we have have studied women as customers compared to men as customers, and they are really quite different. Women tend to underrate their abilities as investors and be financial stewards of their own financial situation. They tend to describe themselves as beginners, even though they actually really know more than they give themselves credit for. They tend to be more methodical studiers and learners of financial information. And very often they believe that a woman would be easier to talk to about something that is as personal and potentially complicated as their financial situation. David so talk about the difference between building a company and going into one which somebody else has built. What is the different type of pressure . If you build a company, you can say i did this on my own. On the other hand, you can flop and you have nothing. You have got a very good company. You can make it even better, but if you flop, people will say you were not really qualified for it. So how do you measure the differences . Abigail those are two really different things. Certainly, i watched my father taking fidelity from a boutique to a Broad Financial Services company. Also my husband has been through three startups now, so i have certainly experienced vicariously the startup world through him. And then, versus my own experience, which was, by the time i started at fidelity fulltime when i got out of Business School in 1988, we were probably up to, oh at least 20,000 employees, Something Like that. With a big company, you have got that big thing up and going, you have the machine in motion, but there is a different kind of need to first of all, make sure that you appropriately find and manage small problems so they do not become big problems that could potentially mess things up really mess things up for you. Also, without perpetual motion of a legacy business, sometimes it is hard to get people to think about what is the next new thing. I talk to people often about looking out at the horizon. What is on the horizon . What is beyond the horizon . And when everybody is running the machine because it is all in place and it is all working, there is a tendency to look at the shortterm and focus on sort of incremental opportunities and not look ahead to the really big opportunities. David as you look at what your future is going to be, how many years would you like to consider doing this . Abigail i am really excited about what i have the opportunity to be doing right now. It has taken me a lot of years to get here. I have had a lot of different jobs around the organization. I have been with the Company Almost 30 years now. And i think this is the moment that i have been waiting for. And it is an opportunity to really run hard and run fast for, i think as long as i can. And i have got a lot of energy right now and my goal is to bring my full energy to what i am doing. And i do not have an endpoint. David ok. Abigail i really want to build a business that can grow and sustain itself beyond me. And i think that is really something i got from my father, because that is what he always wanted to do. He wanted to build a business that would grow and thrive beyond his time. And he focused on planting the seeds to make that happen. David your two daughters, would they ever like to go into your business or you have no ambitions in that direction for them . Abigail i would like to see them be successful, passionate adults that make a difference in the world. And whether it is in the world of fidelity, or the world of something else, is up to them. David so you have talked about some of the pleasures of the jobs you have, but what are some of the not so pleasurable things . What do you not like . Other than an interview like this, perhaps, or Something Like this, but what do you not like . [laughter] abigail there is certainly frustration. But i like to think of frustration as a motivating source. Often with a big company, the most frustrating thing is trying to get things to move quickly enough. Particularly in financial services, where a lot of your operations are geared around safety and security that builds in a natural resistance to change. David how do you deal with philanthropy and the expectation that you are going to give away a fair amount of money . Yeah. L so we have a family foundation, and we have a terrific staff at our family foundation. I work informally with them. Other members of my family, my mother, my siblings, and of course my father, who is the main driver of it for so many years, are all engaged and working with a very competent staff to make sure we are giving away lots of money. David so when you go out to say in boston, do people come up to you and say, how about this philanthropic thing . Or they do not recognize you or they do recognize you . Abigail they mostly dont recognize me. Sometimes i cannot get a table. I often cannot get a table, so i dont eat out that much. [laughter] david but do you ever tell them who you are . Maybe get a table . You dont do that . You dont like to do that . Not your style . Abigail it doesnt happen. Nobody plays a song when you walk in the room anymore. [laughter] i did not bring the coffee. You generally say when will the Program Start and when will it and . They say to me, give shorter answers. What was the Biggest Surprise of the first day in the oval office . Surprised me how easily i can be turned into a twodimensional cartoon. Welcome mr. President , he said, thank you, mr. President. People would not recognize me if my tie was fixed. Lets leave it this way