Now that we are talking careers in our girl talking, with my dear sister Lele. I guess it is a good progress than talking about guys.

Don't get me wrong, I don't totally agree with being that tough. But the part regarding work-life balance seems very inspiring for ladies, I think.

The World According to Carol Bartz

In her journey from cocktail waitress to CEO, Carol Bartz has shattered ceilings and stereotypes. Now she has a new challenge: slowing down. Just a little.

By Martha Mendoza

The Shocking News

When Carol Bartz made her latest big decision -- to step down as CEO of a $1.5 billion company -- she says, "I cried my eyes out." Then she went to her board of directors and delivered the news.

The outgoing CEO of Autodesk Inc., a legendary software company, Carol Bartz is by all appearances the proverbial tough cookie. She's famous in tech circles for how she has handled any number of corporate crises, not to mention the story of how she was diagnosed with breast cancer the same week she started as CEO 14 years ago. Others know how Bartz's mother died when Bartz was 8, how she was rescued by her grandmother from a difficult father, and how she banged her head against tempered glass ceilings at some of the nation's top companies before proving the points that any woman in business had to prove back in the day.

The decision to resign as CEO of the software company she built is one of those tough decisions that tough people have to make. Bartz, 57, and her board were worried that her heir apparent, Carl Bass, would leave Autodesk if he didn't get the chance to run it. Bartz didn't want to groom another successor. And because Autodesk was in great shape, it was a good time to make the change. So, in January, she decided she would take the post of executive chairman and scheduled the handoff for May 1.

Bartz is easy to praise -- and dismiss -- as the pushy female corporate climber who brazened her way past big barriers and emerged triumphant. Not a bad model, but her story, like any good one, is more complicated. The confidence she displays comes from facing down a lot of fears. She passionately loves her work, but her drive is also a legacy of early deprivation: "Once you really have an insecurity," she says, "you never lose it." Bartz has a blunt candor, and a repertoire of smart comebacks. She doesn't really let you in. One thing is clear: She thrives on pressure.

But Bartz's biggest challenge may be the one she has now -- slowing down, even if it's from 120 miles per hour to 115, as she puts it. "I don't have experience" in downshifting, she says. "I've never done it." When she told her daughter, Layne, 17, the news, "She looked at me like I was crazy." Bartz's husband, Bill Marr, who retired 10 years ago, warned her, "Don't expect you're going to come be CEO of the house and boss us around." "They were terrified," Bartz says, laughing.

Not that her in-box is empty. Bartz will head Autodesk's board of directors, travel to India and China to build business, and serve on two other boards. She'll do a one-off assignment for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bartz won't reveal details. Nor will she comment on speculation that she might ultimately take on another big job, something corporate, or in venture capital or philanthropy. Her calendar is booked through next January, except for August, when she plans to see Layne off to college, play golf, and plunge her hands into the soil at her Atherton, California, home. Gardening is a passion learned from her grandmother, and carried with her: Through half a dozen moves around the country as she built her career, Bartz has carted along up to 100 pots of plants she was nurturing, from bearded irises to heirloom tomatoes.

Carol Bartz's early story is one of vulnerability -- and the refusal to be vulnerable. She was born in the town of Winona, Minnesota, in 1948, to a mother with a chronic, disabling disease. Shirley Bartz died when Carol was 8 and her brother, Jim, was 8. For the next few years, Carol would drop Jim off at the sitter's on her way to school and pick him up on the way home. Their father worked at a feed mill for $40 a week. His idea of discipline was to beat the children with a belt.

When Bartz was 12, her grandmother, Alice Schwartz, took her and Jim to raise in her own home, 30 miles away, in Wisconsin. Schwartz was smart, supportive, loving, and strong. Encouraged to succeed, Bartz bloomed: In high school, she was a majorette, the homecoming queen, and one of just two girls in her physics and advanced algebra classes.

She found another home of sorts in the bank where her Sunday-school teacher was president, working her way up from secretary to teller. Like any person with clear memories of money struggles, Bartz remembers every decimal of those early paychecks. She earned 75 cents an hour as a teller. Right after she graduated from high school, the bank managers realized they owed her back pay because of a change in the minimum wage, and gave her a check for $350. It was "the biggest windfall in my life," says Bartz, who years later would cash in $11 million in Autodesk stock options in one year. "It was an incredible amount of money to me."

The bank managers also helped Bartz get a scholarship, allowing her to go to William Woods, an elite all-girls college in Fulton, Missouri. She wasn't one of the crowd, though; she had a job in the cafeteria serving food to the wealthy students. "A pretty humbling experience," she calls it. "I was one of very few students actually working there. It wasn't the kind of school where people did that."

On to College

Two years into college, Bartz took a class at a neighboring all-boys school and fell in love with what in 1966 was an obscure, if intriguing, field. "I was going to be a math major, but I didn't want to teach math. So I took a computer class. Well, the first time I wrote a program, I just loved it," she says, sighing at the memory. "I absolutely loved it. We had to write a program that would add up all of the license plate numbers in the state of Missouri. Ah! I remember that so clearly."

Bartz transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to study computer science, and worked her way through school serving drinks to lobbyists and politicians at the Hoffman House supper club. She exercised constantly ("like, 1,500 hours a day") to fit into the required costume, a red miniskirt and black fishnet stockings, and wore a huge red feather tucked into her hair. Bartz had talked her way into the job, only to discover that cocktails were more complex than she had anticipated. But with help from a friendly bartender, she was soon earning tips from her regular customers. One evening one of those customers snapped her garter belt as he ordered a drink. "Then he looked up, I looked back -- and, oh my god, it was my high school principal!" she says. (William Freese, the former principal, praises Bartz's accomplishments, and says he well remembers the "little outfit" she wore at the club, but that he did not snap her garter.)

Bartz would later apply lessons she learned at the club -- like memorizing her clients' names, hometowns, and favorite drinks -- to her marketing jobs. After college, she sold automated banking services. She remembers "driving around in my go-go boots, traveling to small towns, trying to convince little banks to automate." Then she made the leap to 3M Company.

Being Singled Out

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was barely a vocabulary for the kind of discrimination and harassment Bartz would face, but it was unmistakable from her first day. "3M was where I first realized that this corporate thing against women really existed," she says. "I was definitely singled out." In her first week, Bartz, the only woman professional in a division of 300 men, was sent to an out-of-town business meeting where everyone was assigned to share a room. When "C. Bartz" saw her room assignment, she quietly had the hotel switch her to a single room. The next morning she was met by a manager who had just, apparently, had a good look at the list. "We're going to have to let you go," he said. "You slept with somebody last night."

Bartz can laugh about it now. "They were so whacked out just because there was actually a female there," she says. "I told them I didn't sleep with anybody last night, and that I didn't know anyone there. Even so, for the next several hours, I was fired."

Bartz spent four years at 3M. But in 1976, when she requested a transfer to headquarters, "They told me to my face, 'Women don't do these jobs.' It was the first time I actually heard that," she recalls. "I'm out of here," she told them. She packed up her desk and left.

Bartz pauses in her recounting of this story, rummages through her desk and finds her BlackBerry. She reads aloud an e-mail from a former 3M colleague, sent when Bartz was named to the latest of many lists of top women executives: "I remember your challenge to a manager to allow you to grow and the consequences of his unwillingness to do so. You left. You certainly attained a higher level of accomplishment than any of us minions." Bartz looks up, smiling. "Isn't that nice?"

Moving On Up

Bartz went on to move up the ranks at Digital Equipment Corp. and then at Sun Microsystems, moving to Atlanta, to Boston, and to California. She married and divorced, then remarried. Bill, her husband of 18 years, left his own high-tech industry job to manage the family investments and spend more time with Layne.

But even as Layne heads off to college and her own career, Bartz sees the stubborn remnants of sexism in business. At a meeting in New York recently, she entered a room full of male business leaders. Slim, tall, sparkling with confidence in her trademark red suit, Bartz saw the usual looks of confusion on the faces in the room: Who is this woman? She had her shtick ready. "I must be Carol," she said in a loud, clear voice, "because I'm the only woman."

"It happens all the time," she says later. "Most people assume that because I'm a woman, I'm someone who's standing behind a leader, a man." But she adds, "The fact that they're unenlightened is their problem, not mine."

This is standard Bartz doctrine: She won't wring her hands over problems, but she won't dismiss them either. She scoffs at a statement made by Carly Fiorina, the highest-ranked woman at a public company until she was pushed out of the CEO spot at Hewlett-Packard in 2005. Fiorina had declared that the glass ceiling in high tech was gone. "Carly was so intent on being considered normal, just one of many senior executives in the country, that she just did not want to have another agenda," Bartz says. "In my opinion she was wrong to say that. But she believes it; she gets to say that."

Bartz on the Balance of Life

Bartz is equally unsentimental about the "myth of the balanced life," as she calls it. "Women put all this crap on themselves," she says. "They think, 'I'm going to cook a great breakfast, wash up the dishes before I leave, take the kids to school, call my college roommate on my way in to work, be a CEO all day, volunteer on the way home, do a little exercising, cook a wonderful dinner, help with homework, have sex.'" Bartz pauses, grins widely and shakes her hair. "I don't think so." At Autodesk, she has gotten credit for building a culture that's supportive of busy people. She shuts the company down for a week every winter and takes off five weeks a year herself. But she also wants women to change their thinking. They "beat themselves up for not doing it all, and they get mad at everyone around them. That's nuts," she says.

Bartz developed her own model back when Layne was a baby and she commuted weekly between her home in Dallas and Sun Microsystems in Mountainview, California. At midnight on Thursdays, she would fly home and then spend three days pushing a stroller, going to Gymboree classes and snuggling with Layne. On Mondays, she would kiss the baby and hand her to the nanny, and then fly back to San Jose. "For four days, I got to use my mind, I got to sleep, I got to have a real career. I had the best of both worlds," she says. "It was awesome for me, and I don't think Layne is any the worse for it. I always vowed that if Laney asked me, 'Where do you go, Mama?' I wouldn't do it anymore."

When Bartz talks about that time in her life, she literally ducks her head, as if dodging blows from would-be critics. But she refuses to be judged. How did she handle mommy guilt? "I didn't," she says easily. "I was already well established in the business world. I just felt I should be able to do both, and I had the resources to get good help."

When Layne was a little older, she and Bartz would sit down at the beginning of each school year and look at the calendar together. Bartz would make a handful of commitments: the Halloween party, the Christmas sing. "I'd tell her, 'These are the times Mommy will be here. Anything else will be a surprise,'" she said. "So there was none of this, 'Mommy, can you drive to the Spider Museum?' So she was surprised when I showed up, instead of depressed that I wasn't at everything. She learned about schedules, she learned about commitments, and I did get to enjoy some of the school times." Even so, Bartz admits, there were times when her daughter would "see all of those other moms volunteering at school events, and I'd feel like a slug."

Carol's Life Plan

If there's a Carol Bartz life plan, it's less about balance and more about some high-end compartmentalizing: "My head has a pretty good switch in it, on and off." She spends about half her time on the road and says she doesn't believe in jet lag. She uses sleeping pills, wears an eye mask, and drinks lots of water. And she doesn't "buy into that whole call-home-every-day thing. You're on the other side of the world, waking up at two a.m. to say good night to your family; that's crazy. You call when you can, and you get home soon," she says.

And, where necessary, you resort to brute force determination. When she's not traveling, Bartz is driven from her home in Atherton, part of Silicon Valley, to Autodesk headquarters, which is 75 miles away, north of San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge. It used to be a miserable, daily venture before she taught herself how to read and ride in the back of a moving car at the same time -- without getting carsick.

"We'd stop once, twice, sometimes three times along the way to throw up," she remembers. Her driver, Michael, became adept at dashing off busy Highway 101 so Bartz could lean out the door. "I just figured this was something I had to do," she says. Her family was established in Atherton when she got the Autodesk job, and she didn't want to move them. "There's no way I could spend two hours a day in the car without reading. I can't waste that much time."

Bartz's Bout with Cancer

Bartz took a similar approach 14 years ago to her bout with cancer. Recruited at 43 for the biggest job of her life and anticipating a busy few months, she scheduled a week's vacation between jobs and packed it with a teeth cleaning, a Pap smear and, last, a mammogram.

During the screening, she was impatient with the technician, who kept pulling her back for one more picture. Bartz was eager to go pick Layne up at a birthday party. "I kept telling the technician to hurry it up," she recalls. The next morning, she told her husband, "You know, it was a little odd yesterday. This technician just kept rechecking me." Ten minutes later the doctor called: She had breast cancer.

Bartz began her new job a few days later, but waited a month before she announced at a trade show press conference that she had breast cancer, would undergo surgery and be out for a month. "Which breast?" hollered one reporter. "What an asshole," Bartz says, remembering the moment.

Recovering from a mastectomy and trans flap surgery, to rebuild the breast with abdominal tissue, was brutal. She took just four weeks off, then worked full-time through seven months of chemotherapy treatments. "It's a blur now," she says, "but the chemo part was hell. The biggest hell was that I gained so much weight." She put on and later took off 70 pounds. Bartz still worries about her weight, snacking constantly on diet cheese and diet soda.

Bartz coped with cancer by refusing to feel sorry for herself. "I was of the mind, and frankly still am, that if you focus too much on yourself, you get kind of possessed."

Still, looking back, Bartz says she overdid the "tough guy" routine. "Please tell people that when doctors say it takes six weeks to recover, you shouldn't go back to work after four," she says. "Missing work those two weeks wouldn't have killed anybody. And it was really tough on me. I should have stayed home." She also remembers how she wanted to shield her family from her own worries, but didn't join a support group. "I wish I had dropped the attitude that 'I'm too busy' for a group. That was wrong."

Bartz may have some regrets, but she "doesn't believe in running around with should-haves and would-haves and could-haves," she says. She has always gotten done what had to be done.

There's an irony in her recent decision to give up the power of the CEO job to Carl Bass. Back in 1993, Bartz bought Bass's company, then fired him when she felt he was pushing too hard for change at Autodesk. A few months later, she realized she needed him and hired him back. He went on to develop some critical software and helped the company reverse a dangerous slide during the dotcom years.

Bartz has assured Bass, she says, that she will allow him to have control and run the company. "I promised myself that, before I make any new commitments, I'll see what it's like not to work 80-hour weeks." This is terra incognita, she emphasizes. "When I say it's an unknown, it's an unknown."

No one -- not her family, friends, or Bartz herself -- can picture her spending the next 10 years fine-tuning her golf swing or even puttering around the garden. "I have this work ethic, and that just doesn't go away," she says. "But I also always feel a little insecure. I've been there, I've seen how tough life can be and how fleeting this can be. I will never lose that."

Originally published in MORE magazine, June 2006.

Das的某位爱写议论文的同学写了篇博，其实立意挺有趣的，但是可能表达出来有略微偏差。此公谨小慎微特别爱删贴，被拍砖之后更为不爽，所以我留了个底（还好我动作够快），纯粹因为觉得再过五年十年看看会很有意思。转贴没有征得官方同意，所以所有评论都略去姓名，八卦无聊的同学可以自己在心里默默猜猜哪个是Das回复。

以下讨论仅为个人收藏之用，不代表Das个人立场，大家看看即可。

September 17

某日的闲扯

事多，不顺。不过情绪控制系统工作很稳定。

室友夫妇吵架进入第二天。（年轻啊。。。就是有精神）

F2总是不容易的。憋屈在家里。一般情况下F2的同志们英文又不行，适应当地需求的业务水平又基本没有（不然F2干吗，F1得了，还有钱拿）。

然后F1的同志们白天出去干活，给老板折腾。一个人养两个得抠着花，回来还不许发脾气，因为F2要发脾气。

发脾气的原因是，没车出不了门，又不会开车。。。

典型中国女人啊（这个个案）。

有的时候感觉，中国女性的地位真是高。女同胞们不要砸。确实太高了。

你们可以不用讲道理，可以退一步，可以不用努力。

女权运动是个扯淡的事情。

我不是男权主义者，但是对于“区别对待”政策历来不太感冒。

真要平等，大家站出来公平竞争。

遇到这个话，既得利益者就会跳出来，拿出一堆现有的天然差别来指出区别对待的必要性。

就像白人状告黑人录取政策侵犯受教育权的案子一样。

白人说，我分很高，考了两年都不录取，只是因为要为黑人保留名额，这个违宪。我告。（某大医学院。。。确实值得闹腾。利益啊利益。）

学校没办法，人总还是得收的，况且确实是人才。但是这种族录取政策是你政府政策的延伸，咱败了官司不服。上诉。（背后必定有黑金援。不然能搞上五年么。）

最后结果，高法说，人家那位优秀白人你们后来也收了，现在都快毕业了，（告了又怎么样，拒发毕业证？），讨论这个问题是浪费国家资源。结案。

就是没给明话，这个怎么办。特事特办就了帐。也没法给明话。

“平等”不是公理，只是一种宣传政策；“区别对待”是对“平等”政策的推翻。

没办法，真搞“平等”的话，所谓的“弱势”族群就没翻身的日子了，不暴动就怪了。

想想“南卷”“北卷”。地球人到哪儿都知道。真“平等”了，地球会炸的。

但是又不能明说，因为明说了，地球也是会炸的。

虽然以前其实不平等。顶上要用薨。凡尔纳同学下意识地写道，“因为黑人没选举权。”但是那时候大家都乖，没试过这种甜头。

尝到了甜头，变成了既得利益者，它就要“保卫自己的权益”了。

民族加分，区域加分。。。

这已经变成了当前时代的强大的保守势力。

中国人的收入结构，就普通大众来说，是无法有效支持仅一方工作的生活模式的。所以，除了男性工作之外，女性也是大量工作的。

这个是经济形式决定的。但是，心理上并没有跟上。社会仍旧要求男性来“承担”。而从来没有想过，其实这个是不公平的。

然而这个问题也不会有人讨论。至少在1：1.17的状态下，是绝对不会有兴趣公开叫板的。

中国是女权运动的成功，因为中国潜意识里至少不认为在大多数工作上男女有什么差别。不认为在该不该工作问题上男女有什么差别。

“女人不工作是无能而可耻的，不能要”这个是我母亲的观点。她对于美国有大量家庭妇女感到惊讶。一个典型的普通人的观点。

中国也是女权运动的失败，因为没有限制政策来反向控制。这几乎也是大多数“区别对待”政策的问题：一边倒。

要平衡，必须有反馈。

大学的女生经常抱怨的是，出去找工作没男生好找，工资没男生高，职务前景不好。。。。。。结论：社会不公，咱享受一点也没什么。咱享受也是被逼的。

作为冷眼旁观的人， 我的观点是：

1。没见过优秀人才抱怨这个。

2。企业不是傻子。什么样的东西给什么价。你确实不好用，干吗要开同样的工资。

3。平庸的大学女生比平庸的大学男生在劳动价值上差很多。我要是企业的我也不想录用你。

    关于这一点我很想多说一点。很多女生毕业的时候手上一堆各种等级证书什么的，看得人眼花。

    但是我知道，小例子。那堆什么过了口译的，是否说得溜是个问题。

    这个也许是女生的思维惯式，弄个本本。就像大妈把结婚证裱起来放墙上。这是一种忽视实质的思维。

    企业不是这么思考问题的。弄个本本不代表你就有这个能力。

    进一步，假如所谓的同一起跑线只是“区别对待”的结果，那压根就不是可以比较的。

4。女性成功人士多了去了。不是系统不对，是你不行。

然而不幸的是，这个只是某男生某天的闲扯，不仅不会有什么实际效用，反过来会引发：

进一步列举“不公”；无视，或板砖；以及贴标签。

本来就不一样，还非要一样。

我尊敬一切有智慧有能力的人，无论年龄，性别，种族。

Re1: 

真要平等 你也生个孩子试试

Re2: 

就以这篇文章而论  我就打算鄙视你一辈子

Re3:

果然。连顺序都很符合。

某女精英真是给面子。

你觉得我像是相信“平等”的么。。。

我只是想说，不能依靠系统。要依靠自己，要改变系统。

股市跳水的日子里，要想开点。

Re4:

I think your roommate couples are getting to marriage too young and too naive... which is common in China but shouldnt give you the shadow of "women" or "Chinese women" blah blah...

About fairness...there is no absolute fairness for sure.

Women complaint just because they tend to express out their unsatisfaction about "unfairness", while men choose to shut up and digest the unsatisfaction themselves. It is just the gender difference when facing stress/unsatisfaction.

Re5:

I don't think I have any kind of 'shadow'.

I was just thinking randomly and  I think this discussion just verified that F2 would be a very challenging situation, which I did not try and did not have a chance to try. Of course I may have gone too far in the discussion.

I think a women with career is attractive and respectable. They have selfrespect and they are confident.

And actually I was more interested in finding a solution to form balanced equity in various issues, which is not well done in China.

You are pretty calm in reasoning, that's very good quality.

By the way, both of that couple is over 30...so I guess 'naive' would not fit the profile...

The entry will be deleted within 24 hours. I don't want to get too bad reputation.

Re6:

是啊！鄙视你！生个孩子试试！

Re7:

我尊敬一切有智慧有能力的人，无论年龄，性别，种族。

Re8:

删帖之前留个名吧。Das说的满好的。

我觉得性别差异的不公平其实还是男女共同承担的。也算是个博弈吧？

Re9:

看了半天是说地球要和谐，您没事分析这个东西做啥？

没谈过恋爱吧？那你危险了，女性通常是不喜欢和你讲道理的...

Re10:

我觉得你的帖子写得得蛮好的，体现你有血有肉的一面，强烈要求不要删，就是看着大家那么积极的回复也不要删拉。

我说的是心理年龄，大部分出生小村镇，国内本科，出来读博的同志们都很单纯的，看着的都是学校里，结婚是因为年龄到了家里催了同学们都结婚了，所以对于一个亲密关系里面会产生的问题没有做好心理准备，这种么，摩擦多了不磨平也散伙了。

我觉得你说的很好的啊，都是不平等的，只能自己努力改变自己力所能及的方面。

关于成功的女性，我觉得，所有想成为家庭妇女的人都能修身齐家，所有想成为女强人的人都能治国平天下，就是各自的成功。

男人也一样，家庭性的和事业型的都能得到自己追求的生活，就是成功。

所以没有必要绝对的比较。

找女朋友也一样啊，喜欢讲道理的就找一个愿意听道理的女朋友，脾气不好的就不要找一个也喜欢抱怨的。如果真的能各取所需，就不会有你开头说的那种状态。所以先想想自己是什么样的，适合什么样的，不要急吼吼的像春天里发青的小动物，或者快30岁满街找门牙的猥琐男，就不用担心开头那种状态。

不要删贴拉

Re11:

“不要急吼吼的像春天里发青的小动物，或者快30岁满街找门牙的猥琐男”

哈哈，科学家总是要事业先的，别一天到晚盯着人家F2看。当每个人真正找到属于自己感情的之后，都会说：感情也就这么一回事。

各人有各人的缘，每个人的生活都不同，别人的好与不好、平等也好不公也罢，都只是别人，不是你，自己的路自己走下去好了。

某些方面发散性思维太强是没大必要的，就当你是借题发挥了，哈哈，老习惯，别删咯

Re12:

话说你室友夫妻吵架这件事，似乎不是很适合放到space里面来讲......

你对典型的中国女人，平庸的女人等等的评价，似乎有所特指。假如这是一个普遍性的评论的话，我只想说，我不同意你的看法。

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